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Earth for All
author
Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Owen Gaffney, Jayati Ghosh, Jørgen Randers, Johan Rockström, Per Espen Stoknes
date
2022

About this book

Earth for All is the Club of Rome’s 21st-century answer to The Limits to Growth (1972). Using the Earth4All model, a system-dynamics simulation integrating energy, food, population, inequality, and Earth-system feedbacks, the authors explore two futures to 2100. In “Too Little Too Late,” incremental progress fails to prevent rising inequality and ecological destabilisation. In “Giant Leaps,” five simultaneous transformational policy packages — end poverty, tackle inequality, empower women, transform food, accelerate clean energy — deliver a stable, equitable civilisation within the safe operating space defined by Planetary boundaries.

Key concepts

Highlights

Part 1: The Emergency

From The Limits to Growth to Planetary Boundaries

Context: The book opens by situating itself within the Anthropocene paradigm — the recognition that human civilisation is now the dominant force shaping the Earth system. This framing elevates the stakes: the question is not incremental policy but civilisational trajectory.

Since the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, one scientific conclusion has eclipsed all other scientific insights in the last fifty years. Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This paradigm shift in our understanding of both civilization and the Earth system is as profound as Copernicus’s conclusion that Earth orbits the sun or Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

(p. 83)

The Five Turnarounds: Policy Overview

Context: The book’s central prescription, stated succinctly. The five turnarounds are not aspirational goals but quantified policy packages modelled in the Earth4All system-dynamics simulation. Each comes with specific targets and mechanisms.

Our foresight analysis for this century strongly indicates that the Giant Leap’s five extraordinary turnarounds can be achieved by implementing key policy goals. Poverty. Low-income countries should adopt new rapid economic growth models that secure wellbeing for the most vulnerable. A starting point is reform of the international financial system to de-risk and revolutionize investment in low-income countries. Key policy goals: GDP growth rate of at least 5% per year for low-income countries until GDP is greater than $15,000 per person per year; the introduction of new indicators for wellbeing. Inequality. Shocking levels of income inequality must be addressed. This can be achieved through progressive taxation and wealth taxes, empowering workers, and dividends from a Citizens Fund. Key policy goal: The wealthiest 10% take less than 40% of national incomes. Empowerment of women. Transforming gender power imbalances requires empowering women and investing in education and health for all. Key policy goal: Gender equity that will contribute to stabilization of global population below nine billion by 2050. Food. To transform agriculture, diets, food access, and food waste; by 2050 the food system must become regenerative (storing vast volumes of carbon in soils, roots, and trunks) and nature positive. Key policy goals: Healthy diets for all while protecting soils and ecosystems and not expanding the amount of land, overall, devoted to agriculture; dramatically reducing food waste. Energy. We must transform energy systems to increase efficiency, accelerate the rollout of wind and solar electricity, halve emissions of greenhouse gases every decade, and provide clean energy to those without. Key policy goal: Halve emissions approximately every decade to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

(p. 93)

The five turnarounds at a glance — each a quantified policy package in the Earth4All model:

The Crisis of Legitimacy

Context: The book acknowledges that systemic transformation requires social legitimacy — and that legitimacy is eroding. The crises people experience daily (economic insecurity, climate disasters, pandemics) are both symptoms of the problem and the conditions that make transformation politically urgent.

Momentum is building for change. As we slide deeper into the twenty-first century, people everywhere have been impacted by frequent economic crises, pandemics, wars, floods, fires, and heat waves. But too many people see no viable way to achieve economic security.

(p. 106)

Part 2: Two Scenarios

Too Little Too Late

Context: The baseline scenario. Crucially, TLTL is not a “do nothing” scenario — it includes incremental sustainability progress. The point is that incremental is insufficient: the elephant in the room is structural inequality, and leaving it unaddressed dooms every other intervention.

We explored many scenarios but present just two in this book. Too Little Too Late reflects our current trajectory, where societies keep boasting and bumbling about “sustainability” while muddling through. In Too Little Too Late, most countries make piecemeal, incremental progress toward ending poverty and stabilizing the climate, but do not really deal with the elephant in the room: inequality.

(p. 111)

Giant Leap

Context: The transformational scenario is not utopian — it acknowledges system inertia. Actions taken today will not be felt for years in the economy, decades in the climate. This is precisely why the authors argue that nothing less than a giant leap now is sufficient: incremental reform in the 2020s produces TLTL outcomes.

As our second scenario, we chose Giant Leap, which illustrates the effects of the powerful and immediate implementation of the five extraordinary policy turnarounds. Its passage through the century is driven not by tinkering at the fringes but by fundamentally reconfiguring economies, energy systems, and food systems. It’s a major upgrade. A reset. An essential reboot of civilization’s guiding rules before the system crashes. Due to inertia in economies and in the climate, the main impacts of any action taken today are often not seen for years in economies and decades or centuries in the climate. We believe that nothing less than a “giant leap” now is needed if humanity is serious about turning around from the current trajectory and getting on a new track to a sustainable world by 2050.

(p. 112)

Too Little Too Late: 2030–2050

Context: The detailed projection for the TLTL scenario over the decisive two decades. Population and economic growth slow, but ecological footprint and biodiversity loss continue rising — a combination that characterises overshoot dynamics.

Scenario 1: Too Little Too Late. This scenario shows the potential consequences of continuing world development along the same dynamics as 1980 to 2020. The overall global result is a somewhat slowing population growth and world economic growth to 2050 and beyond, but also declining labor participation rates, declining trust in government, a steady increase in the ecological footprint, and rising loss in biodiversity.

(p. 127)

Part 3: Wellbeing Economy

What Is Wellbeing?

Context: The Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) provides the normative framework behind the book’s goals. Five dimensions of wellbeing — dignity, nature, connection, fairness, participation — replace GDP as the measure of civilisational success.

WeAll describes the core needs for human wellbeing as: Dignity: Everyone has enough to live in comfort, health, safety, and happiness. Nature: A restored and safe natural world for all life. Connection: A sense of belonging and institutions that serve the common good. Fairness: Justice in all its dimensions is at the heart of economic systems, and the gap between the richest and poorest is greatly reduced. Participation: Citizens are actively engaged in their communities and locally rooted economies.

(p. 115)

The five dimensions of wellbeing (WEAll) — proposed in place of GDP as the measure of success in a wellbeing economy:

The GDP Threshold

Context: One of the book’s empirical anchors: beyond ~$15,000 per person per year (PPP), additional GDP growth does not increase life satisfaction. This finding justifies the Giant Leaps poverty floor target and the “post-growth” framing for wealthy nations.

Researchers have found that beyond a certain threshold of GDP per person, further rises in GDP are not associated with further increases in life satisfaction. A recent study from the Earth for All initiative confirms that the fulfillment of human needs and aspirations does not increase considerably when GDP per person grows beyond a threshold of some $15,000 per person per year. One reason is that growth in GDP normally leads to higher negative environmental side effects.

(p. 117)

Part 4: The Five Turnarounds

Turnaround 2: Inequality — Citizens Fund and Universal Basic Dividend

Context: The Citizens Fund mechanism operationalises the “commons as wealth source” insight. Extraction of common resources — land, intellectual property, fossil fuels, pollution rights — generates revenue that is distributed equally to all citizens rather than flowing to asset owners.

This principle evolves into Citizens Funds that pay a universal basic dividend (UBD), where industries pay for the use of common resources (for instance, from land use or ownership, financial assets, intellectual property rights [IPR], fossil fuels, rights to pollute, resource extraction of other materials that can be considered a resource commonly owned by all in society) into a Citizens Fund. This revenue is then distributed back to all citizens in a country equally.

(p. 151)

Carbon Accounting and Consumption Emissions

Context: A structural injustice in current climate policy: emissions are counted at the point of production, not consumption. High-income countries outsource manufacturing and thus outsource emissions accounting — a form of carbon laundering that places the burden on low-income producers.

High-income countries outsource their production to low-income countries to benefit from reduced costs while low-income countries benefit from increased jobs and wages to their many workers. But outsourcing has brought heavily polluting industries and more climate emissions to low-income countries. When assigning responsibility, however, the current standard method for determining carbon emissions is based on emissions within a country’s boundaries. There is no accountability for consumption emissions.

(p. 178)

This lack of distinction between consumption-based emissions and production-based emissions not only allows high-income countries to bypass responsibility, it also places the burden of potential tariffs on low-income countries, without providing them the knowledge/technology or financial resources to measure and control emissions.

(p. 179)

Green Industrial Policy and the Infant Industry Model

Context: The authors rehabilitate protectionist industrial policy as a legitimate tool for green transition. The historical success of South Korea and China in escaping the middle-income trap via protected infant industries is the model. Green industries in developing nations need the same protection from premature international competition.

In a similar manner, there is a need to revive the concept of the “infant industry model”—shielding new industries in a country from global competition—with import restrictions. This model was so successful in helping economies like South Korea and China escape the middle-income trap. By recognizing the need to protect green industries from competing prematurely with larger established international players, countries are more likely to develop local green investments that are sustainable in the long term.

(p. 192)

The 10:40 Inequality Ratio

Context: A concrete, quantified target for the inequality turnaround. Above the 10:1 ratio of richest 10% to poorest 40%, the authors argue social cohesion collapses and long-term collective decision-making becomes impossible.

A key goal of the inequality turnaround is to ensure the richest 10% in societies take no more than the total income of the poorest 40% in society. This means that four poor people together have the same income as one person in the top 10% per year. This is seen as a tolerable level of inequality. Above this level of inequality, social and health problems get much more severe and there is less social cohesion, making it more difficult for governments to make long-term decisions.

(p. 208)

Why Inequality Is Destructive

Context: The meritocracy narrative — that inequality is justified as an incentive structure — is directly challenged. The evidence shows the opposite: extreme inequality is not a motivational spur but a destructive force, degrading the social fabric that enables collective action.

Why is inequality so bad for societies? The argument goes that high inequality provides necessary incentives to work harder. But evidence does not support this. What evidence does show unequivocally is that extreme inequality is a destructive force in societies.

(p. 214)

Turnaround 3: Empower Women — Education and Critical Thinking

Context: The education section addresses a systems-level threat: the industrialisation of misinformation via social media. The authors argue that critical thinking and systems thinking are not optional extras but foundational survival skills for democratic societies facing civilisational challenges.

The overhaul of education everywhere should build on two foundations: critical thinking and complex systems thinking. Arguably the biggest challenge in the world today is not climate change, biodiversity loss, or even a pandemic. It is our collective inability to tell fact from fiction. Social media smashed this model apart. It has industrialized the spread of misinformation and disinformation in the world, polarizing societies, reducing trust, and contributing to our shocking inability to cooperate around common challenges, or even agree on the interpretation of basic facts.

(p. 263)

Turnaround 4: Transform Food — The Planetary Health Diet

Context: The planetary health diet is not merely about reducing meat — it is a comprehensive dietary shift toward plant-rich foods with major co-benefits: reduced premature deaths, freed agricultural land for carbon sequestration and biodiversity, and addressed malnutrition (both over- and under-consumption).

A shift from the typical Western diet to a planetary health diet means far more than just reduced industrially produced meat consumption. It involves a large increase in consumption of fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds. Many health benefits arise from these changes. With them, some ten million premature deaths could be prevented annually by 2040. Much more importantly, poor nutrition still affects hundreds of millions of people, so a planetary health diet must focus on underconsumption as much as overconsumption.

(p. 301)

The only way to lock in a turnaround of the food system is through active governments willing to build an economic system that places a value on sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices.

(p. 315)

Turnaround 5: Clean Energy — Busting the Myths

Context: Five persistent myths about clean energy transition are dismantled. The pattern: what appears as a technical or behavioural barrier is in reality a political economy problem — incumbent interests, stranded assets, and subsidies to fossil fuels, not physics or human nature.

Myth 1: Energy transitions are slow. We are not starting from scratch. We are already thirty years into a renewable energy transition, and crucially, we have reached the critical inflection point in the exponential curve when the cost of renewables is comparable to the cost of fossil energy, or cheaper, in many regions. Myth 2: Many sectors are hard to electrify. Long-distance trucking, shipping, cement, and steel manufacturing were once considered among the sectors that were hardest to decarbonize. New solutions exist to almost entirely remove carbon from these industries. Myth 3: It is difficult to change people’s behavior. The global pandemic has shown that behavior and business models can change very rapidly. Myth 4: Electric vehicles are not as good as internal combustion engines. Electric vehicles often now have higher performance in terms of speed and acceleration than fossil cars. An electric motor and drivetrain may have just 20 moving parts compared to up to 2,000 in an internal combustion engine. Myth 5: Intermittency means clean energy is unreliable. Many studies have shown that fluctuations in the availability of sun or wind can be offset by building more power generation capacity than needed, using energy storage systems, and creating super grids.

(p. 328)

Systemic Efficiency: Demand-Side Energy

Context: Grubler et al.’s 2018 scenario is one of the book’s key empirical anchors for the energy turnaround. By focusing on what people actually need (services, not energy per se) and assuming technology diffusion comparable to smartphones, final energy demand in 2050 could be 40% lower than today despite rising population and affluence.

What do people want to do with energy? They based their scenario on the desire for greater quality of life globally and current exponential trends in technology, for example, the move to smartphones that consolidate many services and less energy. Looking at demand for these services in both North and South, and assuming those in low-income countries want the same access to services as those in high-income countries, the team calculated that, despite a rising population and rising affluence, final energy demand in 2050 has the potential to be around 40% lower than today if this type of technology diffusion is incentivized by governments. This is remarkable.

(p. 331)

Solution 2: Electrify (Almost) Everything. The first principle of fighting the climate crisis is simple: stop lighting coal, oil, gas, and trees on fire, as soon as possible. Instead we should substitute carbon molecules with electrons wherever something needs energy.

(p. 336)

Solution 3: Exponential Growth in New Renewables. Renewable energy technologies keep getting cheaper because they follow learning curves. For each doubling of the total installed capacity, their cost declines by around 20% to 25%. But power from fossil fuel technologies do not have such learning curves. Small granular technologies, think smartphones or electric vehicles, have rapid innovation and marketing cycles. Wind and solar do, too.

(p. 339)

Part 5: A New Economic Model

Five Economic Levers

Context: The economy chapter synthesises the cross-cutting mechanisms behind all five turnarounds. The levers are not sector-specific fixes but structural reforms to who owns the commons, how finance is directed, and how international debt constrains the Global South.

Those levers are in plain sight and waiting to be pulled. And they all reside in one sector: the economy. Key among them: Creation of Citizens Funds to distribute the wealth of the global commons fairly to all citizens. Government intervention (subsidies, incentives, and regulations) to accelerate the turnarounds. Transformation of the international financial system to facilitate rapid poverty alleviation in Most of the World. De-risking investments in low-income countries and cancel debt. Investment in efficient, regenerative food and renewable energy systems.

(p. 359)

Three Economic Narratives

Context: A concise political economy history of how the postwar Keynesian settlement gave way to market liberalisation and then to a rentier economy. Each transition produced new problems that the next narrative failed to resolve — and the rentier economy that emerged after 2008 concentrates wealth in ways that undermine democratic governance.

Narrative one was dominant in the West during the postwar era (1945–1975). Economies were more national than global. Decision-making was a three-way split between business, organized labor, and government. Key aims included full employment that would then support social safety nets. This economic system drove stability, prosperity, and greater equality in some parts of the world.

(p. 365)

What followed? Narrative two, the market liberalization era (circa 1980–2008). Dominant Western nations embraced globalization in return for efficiency. The power of government and organized labor weakened while the power of business expanded. The finance sector rose to dominate the economy, becoming highly deregulated, expanding globally. New problems emerged: expanded private debt, weakened infrastructure, short-term financial decision-making, and rising inequality.

(p. 366)

After 2008, attempts were made to reboot the second narrative using debt while imposing austerity on the public sector. Ongoing structural economic forces accelerated inequality, expanded the numbers of the economically insecure, shrank the middle classes, and undermined growth.

(p. 368)

Narrative three, then, has been the steady rise of a parasitic rentier economy in the name of free markets. Gone is the economy most people think we have—one organized around production, consumption, and exchange. Money is made on money and the shifting value of various assets from stocks and bonds to real estate to intellectual property and crypto. The manipulation of these financial assets now dominates economic decision-making across the globe.

(p. 368)

Reviving the Commons

Context: The Ankerwycke Yew and the Magna Carta anniversary are used as historical anchors for the commons tradition. The argument is not nostalgic but systemic: if shared resources are the ultimate source of all wealth, their governance determines who benefits.

The challenge now is to rebuild an economic operating system that values the commons and operates in a twenty-first-century context. “There is a need to become Indigenous again with community-based economic systems based on local production and consumption needs. Reciprocal exchanges of surpluses with neighboring communities to ensure wellbeing for all and protection of ecosystems need to be revived.”

(p. 376)

The Economic Gameboard

Context: The gameboard diagram captures a structural insight: in the current system, money flows from the productive economy through the finance sector to asset owners — a “trickle-up” dynamic. The three levers (Citizens Fund, regulated finance, debt cancellation) are designed to redirect these flows.

Bang in the middle are two main players that represent the economy as introductory economics textbooks and most people see it: producers (such as firms) in a market exchange with consumers (households, workers, citizens). In a rentier economy, we also have two other major players: the finance and banking sector and the owners of assets, real estate, and monopolistic arrangements. Government tries to oversee this, but has been weakened and cornered by neoliberal ideology.

(p. 381)

The first lever—a Citizens Fund to distribute universal basic dividends generated from fees on wealth extraction and use of shared commons—adds another money tree to the board: nature. It was there all along—the invisible source of all wealth—yet it wasn’t valued, which made it easy to ignore, and to destroy. Once the benefits from nature are shared with citizens, as in the commons of old, wealth begins shifting back to workers, communities, and households.

(p. 384)

The second lever—regulating finance to invest in strategies that address inequality, climate change, and other crises—shakes the private money tree in new ways. Regulations can channel lending away from fossil fuels and unsustainable agriculture and toward clean energy and regenerative practices.

(p. 385)

The third lever—the cancellation of unfair debt—upends the gameboard dramatically. Cancelling $900 billion in international debt burdening low-income nations could free up spending that addresses post-COVID poverty and replenishes or sustains resources. Such a move would affect almost a billion people.

(p. 386)

Wellbeing Economy as Destination

Context: The final convergence: a wellbeing economy measures success by changes in the total stock of capital (produced, human, natural) rather than annual GDP flows. This reframing makes ecosystem restoration and social investment visible as wealth creation rather than cost.

In a healthy economy, what many refer to as a wellbeing economy, future prosperity relies not as much on the annual ups or downs of economic activities, which is what GDP per year measures, but on how well those activities build and maintain the commons—in other words, all of its broad capital stocks—over time.

(p. 390)