Global Justice report says equity key to sustainable development
The World Inequality Lab claims planetary habitability and high well-being can still be met while industries decarbonise.
However, this conclusion only holds if the transformation rests on three pillars.
These pillars are:
- Fast decarbonisation of energy systems
- Sufficiency – a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint, and changes in consumption patterns, food habits, land use and forest cover
- Reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power – both between and within countries
The report claims that the compression of global inequality is not only compatible with decarbonisation, but necessary for shared prosperity on a finite planet.
The Global Justice Report vision for global progress in the 21st century is said to contextualise human development and equality in planetary habitability. It explores how the world could aim for this while tracing an economically and ecologically consistent transition path from 2026 to 2100.
It combines four dimensions that are often treated separately: redistribution at the world scale; reform of the international financial and economic order; transformation of energy systems and substantial shifts in consumption patterns.
The researchers found that under their proposed conditions:
- Monthly national income would converge to €5,000 per capita in every country
- The share of the bottom half of global wealth would increase from 2% to 30% while the share of the billionaire class decreases from 6% to 0.05%
- Nearly 90% of the world’s population would double their income while working roughly half as many hours as they do today
- Warming would reach 1.8°C by 2100, rather than the over 4°C predicted under baseline macroeconomic and policy trends
The report has been written to place global agendas – such as the Bridgetown Initiative Barbados launched in 2022 – within a quantified institutional framework, modelling socioeconomic convergence, temperature change and distributional trajectories through 2100.
