{"id":42189,"date":"2025-01-27T22:26:04","date_gmt":"2025-01-27T22:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/weall.org\/?p=42189"},"modified":"2025-01-29T19:24:44","modified_gmt":"2025-01-29T19:24:44","slug":"from-cali-to-belem-rethinking-economic-growth-to-regenerate-our-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weall.org\/from-cali-to-belem-rethinking-economic-growth-to-regenerate-our-planet","title":{"rendered":"From Cali to Bel\u00e9m: Rethinking Economic Growth to Regenerate Our Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Simon Ticehurst Movement and Advocacy Lead<\/span><\/p>\n

Mexican artist Luis Andrade from Puebla captures the devastation of forest fires, painting with the <\/span>ashes <\/span><\/a>as the medium.<\/span><\/p>\n

Climate change, global warming and greenhouse gas emissions have dominated the global conversation about the environment and our relationship to the natural world since the turn of the century. Important as it is to keep global temperatures down to safe levels, this <\/span>carbon tunnel vision <\/span><\/a>has blinkered many of us from seeing and addressing equally pressing environmental emergencies such as the loss of biodiversity, soil degradation, and pollution and how these are all connected to our economic systems.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When UN general Secretary Guterrez said in 2021 that humanity is waging a senseless and suicidal war on nature, only a few took notice. But as the scale of what the UN calls a triple environmental crisis becomes more evident in our daily lives this is beginning to change.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

S<\/span>torms, wildfires, droughts and record temperatures continued to batter the <\/span>globe in 2024<\/span><\/a> and headline news stories. But the wider decline in our ecosystems is as big an emergency, affecting the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the sustainability of our economies. <\/span>These should not be seen as separate emergencies, vying for our attention and stressing our capacity and budgets, but as symptoms with the same root causes that need to be addressed systematically.<\/span><\/p>\n

Politicians around the world still argue that we need to grow the economy, yet given the overuse of resources in everything we produce and consume and the waste and pollution, how we grow the economy today actually drives environmental destruction, overshooting the planet\u00b4s biological carrying capacity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Important multilateral conferences in 2024 around the loss of biodiversity, land degradation and desertification, and plastics pollution have put other planetary boundaries on the map and the world is waking up to a wider, more systemic understanding of our planetary crisis. Everything we do depends on healthy ecosystems.<\/span><\/p>\n

These issues need to be addressed together, systemically (and not separately as they currently are), since they are all symptoms of a common problem. When we look at the causal factors, we quickly understand the common denominator of our economic systems impacting directly on these dimensions of the planetary crisis.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n