by Prof Paul Read, Dr Sarah Howe, Dr Tony Webb, Tyler Krain, Saima Rahimi, Suzi Karadimas, Lucy Chapman, Darcy Mullins, Gabriel Fitzgerald

 

This article is dedicated to the champion of global climate equality, the indefatigable maestro Aubrey Meyer, now 78, who developed the concept of Contraction and Convergence (C&C) in which every man, woman and child on Earth is given an equal budget of carbon emissions and national development converges on a sustainable budget. His lifelong work reached Number 10 Downing Street, all the way to inspiring Ross Garnaut’s efforts in Australia. Starting out as a brilliant concert violinist in South Africa, his four-year old daughter once asked him “Daddy, is the planet really dying?”. Putting aside his violin, he said “Not if I can help it, darling” and set about to fight for climate justice by establishing the Global Commons Institute. His work can be explored here. 

Aubrey is the recipient of the Andrew Lees Memorial Prize, 1998; Schumacher Award, 2000;] Findhorn Fellowship, 2004; Eurosolar Award 2006;] City of London, Life-time Achievement Award,]2005; Honorary Fellow of Royal Institute of British Architects, 2007; UNEP FI Global Roundtable Financial Leadership Award, 2007. In 2008 a cross party group of British MPs nominated Meyer for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. He was nominated with wide support, for the Zayed Prize in 2010. He was nominated for the Blue Planet Prize, again with wide support, in 2014. 

When asked whether he would like to coauthor this article, he gently replied as follows:

Dear Paul and Sarah,

Thank you for your kind invitation to co-author this article. My apologies for taking so long to respond. Seems to me that you and Sarah and colleagues have come to a developed and fair view of C&C (as per Ross Garnaut, etc.). Fair enough. Follow your instincts and go with that. For me, however, C&C was always about prevention — doing enough soon enough to try and avoid runaway rates of climate change. The views you have expressed reinforce this, as summarised in this chart: 

Simply put, it is now too late for C&C. Prevention is no longer possible. Sadly, from now on, adaptation will always be to increasingly adverse conditions. It will not be fair. The momentum behind this adversity is now too great to avoid.

Thank you again for the offer.

All the best

Aubrey Meyer

 

A brief summary

The response from Aubrey Meyer, a champion of mitigation, is crushingly poignant, echoing the recent pronouncements by David Susuki and similarly impassioned pleas from David Attenborough. But we must fight on as all three still maintain there is a thin sliver of hope for a dying planet and a beleaguered humanity, a hope we will try to outline in the last half of this article. What follows is a long paper, covering a lot of ground, attempting to weave some ideas into a program that is likely to be only part of a solution or remedy to an existential problem. The world faces a crisis unprecedented at least in the period since humanity evolved. The continuing release of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere is creating a ‘greenhouse effect’ that traps more of the heat absorbed by the earth — a gradual but inexorable rise in global temperatures that is disrupting long established and relatively stable patterns of heat exchange in oceans and the atmosphere. These disruptions are already causing drastic changes in climate and weather patterns, notably leading to more extreme weather events resulting in increased frequency and intensity of droughts, fires and floods. To which is added the risk that some of these patterns, particularly those affected by glacial melting affecting sea level rises and ocean currents may be reaching tipping points that further feed into the warming system, with more rapid disruption to patterns of agriculture and societies that may be irreversible.

Attempts to achieve international agreement to slow down, remediate and hopefully prevent these effects since the threat was clearly identified in the 1970s — a half century ago — have garnered at best very limited political support. World Conferences of Participants (COPs) have reached agreement on the need to set goals for reductions by target dates, particularly that global temperature increases above pre-industrial levels should be kept below 2 degrees Centigrade — and preferably below 1.5 degrees. Unfortunately, it appears that these goals are unlikely to be met. Two important papers published in January 2025 (Bevacqua et al., 2025; Cannon, 2025) suggest the 2016 Paris Agreement that set these goals is failing. Far beyond confirmation that we’ve already hit 1.5 is the ominous prediction that we’re headed for 3.4 before the year 2100, with some models suggesting before 2050. 

Below we explore: 

• details from these studies and others that are indicating the scale of the crisis and our failure to meet it
• reframing of the challenge in terms of some thinking around Raworth’s ‘doughnut model’ that identified outer and inner limits for a functioning social-ecological economy, and how these might be applied practically in an international context through attention to: 
• examination of human needs within the human rights framework, 
• how global energy chains can support human flourishing in a climate constrained future, 
• energy sovereignty across and within countries, 
• feasibility of net zero by 2050, 
• alternative economic growth metrics based on measures of social flourishing such as longevity and wellbeing, social and economic equality starting with race, culture and gender — and how rather than seeing such changes as ‘degrowth’ or ‘recession’ such alternatives would shift from exponential growth in material consumption to experiential consumption and building infrastructure that adapts to a changing climate. 
• how these ideas might be applied in Australia in areas such as: welfare, taxation; housing, transport, distributed energy, and lessons we can draw from initiatives elsewhere in the world.

A big task and an attempt that will undoubtedly leave many gaps, questions and areas for further discussion, but such is the role of the Fabians as we seek solutions that put working people at the forefront of solutions to the problems created by corporate dominated capitalism. 

 

Recent studies showing we are breaching the international climate agreement

The first study led by Canada’s Alex Cannon (2025) notes data from Copernicus Climate Change Service and the Berkeley Earth temperature update says that June 2024 was the twelfth month in a row with global mean surface temperatures at least 1.5 °C above pre-industrial conditions. They question whether this means the threshold minimum of the Paris Accord has been officially triggered. They note that two triggers exist — one is 12 months of consistent warming and the other is a future metric in which a 20-year mean crosses 1.5. The question is whether the 12 months is sufficient to presume the 20-year mean will follow suit. Using data from multiple models they find that 12 consecutive months of 1.5 degrees would suggest a 60-80% probability that even the 20-year average has been triggered early, long before 2030 and possibly -33 months to June 2024, bringing us backwards to around 2020. 

The second paper led by Emanuele Bevacqua and colleagues (2025) also deals with the second trigger. From the Helmholtz Centre in Germany, it notes first that multiple datasets and approaches from different organisations converged on a 2024 average increase of 1.55 degrees above the pre-industrial baseline. The problem, as both papers point out, is that under the terms of the Paris Agreement acceptance of this cannot be based on a single year but must be assessed in hindsight only after decades of observation, which would be far too late. Using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIPP6), they test (combining actual data and simulations) whether a single year can be appropriately used as a red flag marker for a 20-year prediction based on 1981-2014. They found that a continuation of the strong warming trends observed over the last decades would render it virtually certain that the first single year at 1.5 °C signals a 20-year period of breakthrough warming. 

These suggest the world needs to prepare for the imminent implications of a ‘1.5 world’ as outlined in the IPCC Synthesis Report of 2023 (IPCC, 2023) – viz., in summary, 3.6 billion people vulnerable to natural disasters, acute food and water shortages, mortality from floods, droughts and storms rising 15 times higher, irreversible ecosystem collapse, glacial retreat, rising sea levels, widespread and accelerating species extinction, and the emergence of new and spreading vector-borne diseases. In essence, both these studies confirm that Earth has probably entered a 20-year period of global warming exceeding, and breaking, the agreed limits of the Paris Accord. The German paper further warns us that additional warming, towards 2 degrees, might still be avoided if rapid and stringent mitigation strategies are enacted today. Not tomorrow. Today. 

While the German paper is strong, the Canadian paper warns that their approach can be altered by initial conditions and unexpected forcings that are not included in the models. Candidates for unincluded forcings include the Tonga eruption in 2022, changes to global shipping regulations, the strong El Nino of 2023-24, and the impact of COVID, the logic being that any difference between real-world and modelled predictions would indicate missing or unincluded forcings. Note this means we could be in for much worse than 1.5 before 2030. They finish on a call to examine these closely but warn this: if 1.5 °C anomalies continue beyond 18 months, that is, taking us to February 2025 the breaching of the Paris Agreement threshold on both criteria is virtually certain. 

Together these papers suggest we’ve officially breached the Paris Agreement and we must immediately adapt to a ‘1.5 world’, simultaneously ramping up efforts to mitigate against much worse. We’ve been making these warnings for decades; see the effort led by Prof David Karoly (who also writes in this edition). The timeline ominously matches our own efforts to test whether we can use C&C to constrain emissions within the SR1.5 budget established by Prof Malte Meinhausen before 2050, whilst still maximising human life expectancies across countries and time, against global human populations (see the final article in this edition). This crossed a threshold in 2023. Some time soon, we’re going to have to make serious alterations to our socioeconomic, energy and infrastructure systems that transcend ‘politics as usual’. We can do it with resource wars and misery or else creativity and compassion. We like to think most people would choose the latter no matter what flavour of politics they prefer. 

Just over the past few months a host of other papers have confirmed the worst. 

• The Bureau of Meterology confirmed Australia smashed temperature records again and ANU Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick says “same shit, different year”. 
• Nature articles identify 34% of arctic zone at climate tipping point - After millennia acting as a store for CO2, a third of the arctic boreal zone is now releasing it as permafrost melts from warming roughly three times faster than the rest of the world (more than 3 degrees since 1970 alone). 
• Ocean shows record heat gains since 2010 — Team of 54 scientists across nations shows ocean, which traps 90% of global warming, steadlily heated over the past 5 years trapping another 16 zettajoules in the top 2000 metres — equivalent to 140 times the world’s total electricity output.
• Save the Children publishes climate resilience report showing Gen Alpha will suffer 7 times more heatwaves, close to three times river floods, crop failures, and droughts, twice the wildfires, than we do now.
• James Hansen, world’s leading climatologist, publishes paper announcing we have officially failed the Paris Agreement — we will reach + 2 degrees by 2045
• A meta-analysis of 3286 observations from 157 studies confirmed by separate AI model shows microplastics are interfering with photosynthesis, affecting land production by 12% and oceans by 7%, due to add another 400 m suffering starvation within two decades compared to current 700 m people.
• Disordered behaviour in species across 38 countries.
• Microplastics in human brain up 50% in 8 years, reaching the collective size of a plastic spoon (7 grams). 
• Spermageddon’ by 2045? A significant meta-analysis in 2017 revealed a 52.4% decrease in sperm concentration and a 59.3% decrease in total sperm count in men from North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand between 1973 and 2011. Again, related to plastics and estrogenic leakage.
• Insurance giants say capitalism collapses at 3 degrees. The economic value of entire regions — coastal, arid, wildfire-prone — will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will re-price, rapidly and brutally.

What these show is that it’s already happening and these are just a tiny selection of recent studies relating species extinction, pollution and climate change as evidence of capitalism committing suicide. 

 

Ok we have a problem — what’s the solution?

It would be easy to say that the political work has barely started yet and we’ve already breached at least four and possibly now seven of nine planetary boundaries in the midst of multiple crises — carbon, extinction and inequality among them. What are those planetary boundaries and how do they relate to politics? 

Let’s back up a bit with a short description of original research being undertaken by Fabians’ Sarah Howe and Paul Read based on economist Kate Raworth’s Oxfam- and Oxford-affiliated Doughnut Economics (Raworth, 2017), a system challenging neoliberal economics and championing work by Fabians-affiliated London School of Economics. 

 

Kate Raworth’s Doughnut in which 12 social foundations serving human economies must be constrained within 9 planetary boundaries

 

Consider Kate’s doughnut, showing how at least four planetary boundaries have been breached — land, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, species extinction and climate change — even though they represent the boundaries of the inner circle in which human needs are meant to be satisfied by the variously insane socio-political systems that our collective creativity has so far (failed to have) manifested since the Enlightenment. This is an older depiction of the doughnut as more recently we surpassed seven boundaries.

Within the inner circle are 12 social foundations that reflect about 250 years of thinking and research that culminate in something akin to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals — stuff beyond GDP per capita and UN Human Development Index, and such. Of course, post-modernist thought would now demolish the lot because of its obdurate resistance to anything close to representing universal values that might unite humanity. Instead, it seems to prefer the anarchic chaos of cultural relativity in the face of a truly existential threat to human existence necessitating some form of universal agreement that can only emerge from the quantitative efforts of a toxic patriarchy. But that’s another story, thank you very much Firestone and Foucault. 

Raworth’s 12 social foundations are universal across 194 UN member states and 8 billion people — men, women and children. While people might be united in their need for food, water, housing/shelter, health, education, secure and meaningful work, peace and justice, political voice, social and gender equity, and socioeconomic networks, some of these social foundations might be more important for some people than others, or indeed at different levels of national development. But what unites us is the need to challenge head on those who would deny or argue we keep stum on all the evidence, dismiss it as a UN conspiracy, and miss the opportunity to save the whole damned planet, including the denizens of Nature on the verge of the sixth mass extinction as well as the idea that men, women and children all deserve health, equity, safety and an intact social contract. Let’s challenge those arguing and ‘virtue-signalling’ on social media who pose as victims and misappropriate the narratives of social and economic hurt to demonise those of us struggling to expose extreme views (from both sides of politics) that whitewash, greenwash, genderwash, and racewash a system rotten to its core. 

 

Some practical steps towards an ecologically socially and economically sustainable future

As democratic socialists we recognise that tackling socio-economic inequality is essential to any hope of tackling climate issues. You’d be right to think we’re a tad fed up with rhetoric on all sides of politics that ultimately hides what amounts to socioeconomic gaslighting — one that feeds the monster of modern inequality and simply shifts power structures from one capitalist group to another. Those entertaining anything akin to true freedom and meritocracy (not the usual capitalist sleight of hand) are engaged in another layer of self-deception and it’s time they owned up — or were called out. By the same token, this is getting mightily serious at a global level and there’s no longer any room for inauthentic socialism working from a position of magnanimous power — whether across sexes, races or generations. We can’t keep using our socialism to patronise the weak and valorise our virtue. We must act and probably act with courage and self-sacrifice.

In the meantime, while we await the revolution, what measures can we take that move us in this direction? It has been said that Aubrey Meyer’s C&C concept (Garnaut, 2011) is perhaps the only feasible equity lever for global carbon emissions towards net zero. The concept in its simplest form is to contract global emissions whilst giving nations an equal per capita target — it focuses on the unfashionable mitigation work (changing our consumption habits) rather than the sexy adaptation work (technology as saviour). 

Early work on mitigation using C&C showed a form of Pareto Efficiency (see link) at moderated targets of 6.6 tonnes per capita, based on human outcomes akin to Richard Layard’s WELLBY and Veenhoven’s Happy Life Year, a composite of life expectancy and human wellbeing that can also be used to compare countries across time based on political and economic systems (Read et alia, 2013; Read, 2017). It also resonates beautifully with Jim Chalmer’s recent commitments to developing a Wellbeing Budget, an approach which appropriately uses a dashboard of metrics even if the metrics are not wholly, as yet, in keeping with recent developments in public health and economics. What’s more it has the capacity, using cumulative historical emissions, to inform repatriation levers between developed and developing countries differentially affected by climate change, aka the Brasillian Suggestion. The same approach, using frontier regression adapted by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen for the Millennium Development Goals is now being used for the 2030 UN SDGs (Read, 2017). 

In Australia, Dr Read’s students are using the method to identify social flourishing targets within planetary boundaries based on Kate Raworth’s 12 social dimensions in Doughnut Economics. However, the problem is that Kate Raworth’s doughnut, although it resonates with the work of LSE’s Ian Gough (inspired by Maslow) on human needs, has, as yet, no way of empirically measuring the exact target for the 12 minima. Frontier regression attempts to resolve this with reference to Maslow’s Hierarchy and Max-Neef’s economic needs theory. This has cascading implications for net zero negotiations driven by the Paris Agreement, as well as the current arguments around national accountability presently being held at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. As the world uses more of its S150 carbon budget (Meinhausen’s budget), this value diminishes each year, losing capacity to satisfy human needs. Dr Read’s students are focusing on the social dimensions of food, health, education, income and work, peace and justice, social equity and gender equality. 

Dr Howe, former Fabians Chair and recognised expert in the global value chains of energy, is simultaneously building the broader argument around the feasibility of achieving net zero in a way that satisfies the political economy of human needs within the doughnut framework. Her work will be supplemented and informed by the results from Dr Read’s lab and will focus on elaborating the implications of the work for: 

• an examination of human needs within the human rights framework, 
• the degree to which global energy chains can support human flourishing in a climate constrained future, 
• the geopolitical need for energy sovereignty across and within countries, 
• the feasibility of net zero by 2050, and 
• the implications informing ongoing negotiations at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. 

The end result will be a set of target minima for human needs, against which countries can all be assessed as falling within, nudging up, or blasting through the nine planetary boundaries that constrain economic growth and social systems. Nobody likes constraints, much less neoliberal growth fetishists, but the rising tide of sustainable solutions being offered in its place now paint a far prettier picture for human progress, if only we can break free of old thinking and some elements of human nature.

 

The way forward

This article began with a litany of red flags and warnings. It’ll finish with what sustainability could look like if economic growth metrics were replaced with measures of social flourishing such as longevity and wellbeing. It will also point to some of the work being done that attempt to put these into practice. The reason we do this is because the vast majority of concerned and educated voters are crying out for a vision of a sustainable future — not just more climate threats but actual opportunities. 

 

What should a 1.5 world look like if we act now?

The age-old problem of Pareto efficiency, in which redistribution of resources leaves nobody worse off, can never be solved using dollars as the metric, but becomes eminently solvable when shifting to something more akin to human health and happiness. Moderation rather than linear growth becomes key, in which case the extremes of an inverted U curve, all converging on a moderated target that allows redistribution to maximise outcomes for everybody — a long and happy, meaningful life. This is a simple feature (and indeed outcome) of a healthy metabolic system constrained by feedback loops. Moreover, it operates for all human needs, through social and esteem needs, up to self-actualisation. Not enough oxygen and too much oxygen kills. Not enough water and too much water kills. Not enough food and too much food kills. The poison and the remedy both defined only by the dose. The same applies to inequality, economic growth, justice, power and a host of socioeconomic metrics, of which there are 10,000 collated by the UN and WHO. The majority optimise at a moderated target as opposed to real poisons like war, homicide, and disease. 

Gender equality is one metric that optimises social flourishing but happens to fall among the basic human needs — as important as food and water — compared to economic growth, which is far less important for human outcomes than previously thought (as is the carbon emissions supporting it). As the Chinese Maoist saying went “Women hold up half the sky “. They are as critical to any economy as they are reproduction and child care. Their education and economic liberation is also critical to managing the growth in global population. The fascinating thing about the frontier results is that human flourishing does not swerve towards either men or women but holds at perfect equity — a 1:1 ratio where both men and women are equally treated. 

As indicated above, economic equality — or at least a reduction in inequalities that see a handful of rich men owning more than a quarter of the world’s wealth — is also critical to solving the climate crisis. Previous studies suggest we need to moderate our annual targets for economic growth to around 3%. Actual equality measured using the Palma ratio (a simple calculation of the amount owned by the top 10% against the lowest 40%), far from requiring perfect outcomes, suggests the richest 10% should not own more than five times the amount owned by the lowest 40% on average. Such a measure is neither pure communist nor pure capitalist. It still preserves incentivisation for productivity. Food stuffs and caloric intake using this method all point towards known dietary requirements and even replicate the Harvard Food Plate (which replaced the Food Pyramid) As was suggested by a medical doctor at a UN sustainability forum hosted by the Malaysian PM in 2013, true Pareto efficiency could be achieved if we could somehow shift the fat around his waist to the bones of children in drought-stricken Africa. 

Pareto efficiency can be achieved if money is subordinated to human needs as it should be, rather than serving as an evolutionary signal for sexual fitness (driving human social hierarchies). In fact, we could go further and suggest that the deeper drive for signalling sexual fitness via resource hoarding is ironically driving the very thing it’s meant to avoid — reducing the reproductive viability of our own young — an issue being explored under the title of “Sex & Sustainability — the Jane Austen Paradox” by Dr Read’s group with evolutionary psychologist Dr Danielle Sulikowski at Charles Sturt University. 

Aside from the mismatch between human needs and the economic system we’ve developed, the broader work of seeking to replace GDP with more human-centred metrics began taking form when Amartya Sen and colleagues spearheaded the Human Development Index, later took form in the context of climate change with Nic Marks’ Happy Planet Index (Marks et al., 2006) (and China’s Green GDP, a failed experiment), and was further valorised by two efforts that came out about 10 years ago — Wilkinson’s Spirit Level (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009) and the Sarkozy Commission’s work on human wellbeing as an alternative measure of economic output, work again supported by Nobel prize winning economists (Fitoussi, Sen and Stiglitz, 2010). The Earth Institute took up the call in its development of the World Happiness Report and Richard Layard’s construction of the WELLBY (Helliwell et al., 2024), a metric similar to Veenhoven’s Happy Life Year (Veenhoven, 1996). These fit nicely with Raworth’s (Raworth, 2017) doughnut economics and the broader work of the SDGs.

 

What could a world look like under social flourishing metrics instead of the blunt and rusty razor of GDP per capita? 

The 20-Minute City could evolve and unfold around a central point where residents can access most of their daily needs within a 20-minute walk, cycle, or public transport trip with a radius of one kilometer. Housing could still provide a mix reflecting age-appropriate needs and personal expression. Household commercial and industrial energy, in the form of electrical power or sustainable electrically-generated hydrogen could come from a mix of solar and small-scale hydrogen plants with underground wires and piping, all of which have been trialed along with energy efficient housing using roof and wall paints to suit the climate. Connecting roads for freight would remain but communities could retrofit roads into interconnected green spaces (for other species to flourish) and waterways with smaller paved tracks for smaller electric vehicles and cycling. Public transport would require smaller shared vehicles capable of moving children and groceries. Work-from-home could be encouraged, as could schooling from home, allowing socialisation to focus on play, community events, building and localised permaculture. Schools and childcare would mix at-home care with community engagement.

Buildings could be retrofitted for energy efficiency, which includes vertical growth of harvestable plant-life (even in major cities), further providing shade and cooling against the urban heat island effect (multiple studies have shown tree coverage and foliage are key to adapting to climate change). Local markets would shift from imported to local produce. This could extend to the production of cultural products, e.g. shifting from scaled and globalised music by celebrities, for example, back to supporting home-grown artists from local communities through live events. Employment could be supplemented by UBI (multiple studies now show this encourages localized economic growth by allowing people to pursue their own creative endeavours, trades and small businesses). Local theatres, libraries, museums and art galleries could be cooperatively run to serve local talent, schools and cultural and community events.

A major part of the circular economy includes recycling of human waste. This offers multiple avenues for localised processing for both energy and agriculture. For energy, systems rely on anaerobic digestion where microorganisms break down waste into biosolids without oxygen. This produces methane to generate electricity, as well as digestate stabilized biosolids rich in nutrients. The latter is further treated for safety to use in agriculture using processes like dewatering, composting and thermal drying. The biosolids can also be incinerated or gasified to produce ash, bio-oil, bio-char, phosphorous, nitrogen and magnesium. 

As well as producing green by-products there are also nutrient recovery technologies to extract nutrients from liquid wastewater streams that also go back into the system for agriculture production. Note all of these systems work more efficiently in localized, small-scale community ecologies. All of these represent a shift from simple disposal to sustainable resource management, turning a waste product into valuable resources while protecting public health and the environment.

 

Some practical measures towards sustainability in a 1.5 world and specifically Australia?

As noted above, the changes needed would not necessarily entail degrowth or recession, but rather growth would shift from exponential growth in material consumption to experiential consumption and the sharing of more localised trades, services and produce, thus breaking inefficient inequality drivers like globalised scalability of cultural collateral (music, art, entertainment, food). It would simultaneously mitigate carbon emissions, species extinction and pollution by developing policies that modulate human consumption patterns, whilst also building infrastructure that adapts to a changing climate. Far from fears of one-world government, participatory democracy and localised economies would be nurtured in small-scale cities — the village model underpinning the 20-minute city, supported by economic cooperatives. 

Tax reform will be needed to achieve both socially available capital and to reduce inequality. A first step towards this in Australia would be to remove capital gains tax as a subsidy of housing speculation so sustainable infrastructure costs could be funded — the Grattan Institute puts this at only $11.7 billion. Another would be to gently phase in forms of death duty to break transgenerational hoarding whilst reducing base-level income tax in favour of what amounts to a reset at birth to incentivise individual productivity. These are no longer wild ideas but favour true meritocracy rewarding risk, hard work and talent. They need not be so extreme as to entail wholesale revolution but rather gradualism in the great tradition of Fabian incrementalism. Nor are they meant to incite fears of a WEF or communist conspiracies in which people ‘own nothing but are happy’. Ownership remains but the rules of transmission are moderated for local, rather than global, economic outcomes — outcomes that serve individual and community health and cohesion rather than aggregated and scalable economic extraction serving a globalised elite. The local cooperative would become a hub of community economic development, owned by community but equally free to trade comparative advantage.

The second measure would be to institute output metrics measuring human health and longevity alongside supporting policies that encourage localised circular economies. This is especially important in the building industry for new homes as we need a new breed of incentivised master builder to creatively reuse materials for ultradurable longevity (rather than current levels of extravagant waste and 60-year building lifespans) even if it costs them more in terms of labour. They become more specialised in integrating technologies, just as car mechanics have become adept at integrating computer technology and will continue to adapt as we shift to electric vehicles (with electricity generated from renewables). 

The third would be to explore more progressive taxation to reward sustainable industries and take the edge of inequality, trialling a UBI for certain sectors and gradually phasing out income tax in favour of a more nuanced GST targeting unsustainable luxury goods (like SUVs) as well as outright poisons like alcohol and tobacco. Not in the way of a ban or blunt Pigouvian tax (which simultaneously encourages tobacco wars as well as deeper poverty among entrenched addicts), but rather localised production and, in some cases, community support services via, for example, NDIS. 

This is not meant to be creating a government-regulated straight-jacket of wowserism but simply a more moderated system of living where time, family, community and artistic endeavours can be properly respected and nurtured at the local level. This replaces the growth and efficiency fetish of a 60-hour work week (at least among those with a job) and is more in tune with what UK economist and UBI expert Guy Standing describes, with reference to ancient Greek conceptions of productivity, as time for recreation, care and creativity being equally respected as ‘work’. This takes the heat off the drive to addiction fostered by modern conceptions of work, in short allowing rest and recreation to nurture talent, business productivity, and even self-actualisation through creativity, courage, compassion and unpaid care (once described as the ‘work of women’ by Amartya Sen’s Oxford PhD supervisor, Prof Joan Robinson).

Guy Standing further says we need to revive the commons. The shift from middle class to precariat needs to be halted through ‘commoning’ at the local level, which he describes as the most important form of meaningful work — the local care economy and volunteerism recast as productivity in place of work conceptions created by rentier capitalism driving neo-feudal slavery through the 100-year old obsession with inhuman productivity efficiencies. Of course, all this needs housing and community infrastructure to support it. Experiments in family-friendly, high-density housing have been underway in Canada since 1992 and Brazil since the 1970s. 

Other experiments in green, energy-efficient urban planning have been rolled out in a host of other nations. 

Copenhagen has established cycling highways. 

The Vauban district in Freiburg, Germany, has integrated passive energy housing using ultra-high levels of insulation, airtight construction, high-performance triple-glazed windows, with extensive roof-mounted solar panels, along with a local woodchip electricity generator. They manage water through permeable pavements, green and productive roofing that absorbs water, bioswales (vegetated channels that filter and slow runoff), and infiltration trenches to allow rainwater to soak back into the ground naturally, reducing flood risk and replenishing groundwater. 

Singapore has further integrated vertical greenery with high density living (green walls and rooftop gardens) plus a network of horizontal interlinked parkways with reclaimed water purified by membrane technologies. 

Since the 1970s, Curitiba in Brazil has used elevated tube stations for localized public transport; Cambio Verde goes a step further allowing low-income residents to exchange waste for public transport tokens. 

Oslo in Norway has fully instituted electric vehicle support infrastructure. 

Amsterdam is tackling rising sea levels by building floating neighbourhoods (there are many around the world) and building entire circular economies by rewarding the reuse of building materials, reducing food waste and promoting repair. Planned obsolescence is banned and monitored, as it should be. Construction waste in Australia is an issue because building materials have been relatively cheap compared to labour, causing a fast, throw-away business model by most tradies leaving mountains of waste behind. 

Masdar City in UAE is something of jewel in the crown of sustainable communities designed from the ground up to test renewable energy with large solar installations supported later by localised hydrogen plants, energy-efficient building design, water conservation, waste reduction, and sustainable transport (including early trials of autonomous electric pods). It serves as a living lab for green technologies in a hot climate, even using simple black and white paint to modulate energy. Green hydrogen production is planned for worldwide rollout by Masdar. This uses renewable electricity generated from sources like solar or wind power to drive an electrolyzer. The device splits water (H₂O) molecules into their constituent elements: hydrogen (H₂) and oxygen (O₂). Because the electricity source is carbon-free, this electrolysis process produces hydrogen without emitting greenhouse gases. The resulting hydrogen gas is a versatile, clean energy carrier. It can be stored, transported, and used in fuel cells or turbines to generate power, heat, or fuel vehicles, releasing only water vapor when consumed. Oxygen is the sole byproduct of its creation. And hydrogen plants can be safely built in small local units. 

Although Masdar is looking at hydrogen it already relies on solar energy. This includes a significant 10-megawatt utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) plant covering a large area, extensive rooftop PV installations on buildings throughout the city, and explorations into concentrated solar power (CSP) technologies. To combat the hot desert climate with minimal energy use, Masdar also incorporates specific design technologies. This includes narrow, shaded pedestrian streets oriented to funnel breezes, buildings clustered closely to shade each other, high-performance insulation, specialized low-emissivity window coatings, and facades designed for shading and deflecting solar radiation (in other words, white paint on walls and roofing). 

A modern interpretation of a traditional ‘wind tower’ (barjeel) was also built to help cool public spaces. In an arid region similar to many areas in Australia, water technology is crucial. Masdar employs greywater recycling systems within buildings for non-potable uses (like irrigation or toilet flushing), and advanced wastewater treatment facilities to maximize water reuse across the city, significantly reducing reliance on potable water sources. A system of waterways act to cool the city whilst providing recreational and aesthetic uses. As to transport Masdar has constructed personal transport and electric vehicles city-wide using small, automated, electric pods running on dedicated tracks supported by electric buses and widespread EV charging infrastructure. Supporting this, Masdar also utilizes smart technology to monitor and manage energy consumption efficiently. This includes smart grids to optimize energy distribution from various renewable sources and sophisticated building management systems within structures to control lighting and cooling. 

All up, Masdar is a model of sustainability that suits Australia’s arid climate. Already tested and in operation, it offers an aesthetically enhanced solution to the 20-minute city. If all this is combined with some solid exploration of policies focused on human social flourishing as the main output to economic growth then energy sovereignty as well as human health and longevity, not to mention equality, could contribute to a 1.5 world in which our children have hope, health, time to live and breathe. 

It’s long past time when false ideological dichotomies and their tribalistic battles should give way to evidence-based policy that is agile and adaptive in a fragile world.

 

To conclude 

What we have attempted here is to the highlight the real and urgent nature of the crisis posed by what has been called ‘climate change’. It places this existential crisis in the context of its challenge to develop a more socially and economically as well as ecologically sustainable future where the old order can no longer serve the needs of humans (or other life) on this planet. What it also attempts is to highlight some of the changes that are essential if we are to either avoid or at least mitigate some of the worst consequences of climate change — to illustrate how they are far from being idealistic or in need of what some might call ‘the revolution’ — though their effects if we were to achieve many would indeed be revolutionary — but arrived at by evolving changes based on both social-democratic government policies and popular participation in practical steps towards agreed goals. In addition they use technologies already being rolled out around the world. 

Like most writings — and the speeches of concerned politicians and activists alike — these are merely words — and remain just words until we translate them into political action. We are doing our bit, and we suspect most who read this will be also. How do we now engage and build a majority that insists action be taken now? At a time when we are breaching the 1.5 degree target, action is crucial to avoid the worst. 

 

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