Envisioning
Happy New Year 2030 By Robert Costanza, PhD
It’s new year’s day 2030 and, like many on planet Earth, I’m surprisingly happy about the way the last decade finally turned out and the prospects for the future.
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t the dawn of the decade in 2020, things looked incredibly bleak. The climate crisis was rapidly accelerating and it looked as if we would never get a handle on it.
I remember sitting in my apartment in Canberra, Australia on Jan 1, 2020 surrounded by dense smoke from the catastrophic bushfires consuming the country’s southeast coast and thinking: this has got to finally wake people up! The entire county was burning up! The increasing heat and drought that caused fires of this magnitude was obviously related to climate change. The majority of the population of Australia agreed. Yet Australia’s Prime Minister at the time was still in denial. He believed that dealing with climate would “hurt the economy” and was still touting coal as the answer even though solar and wind were already cheaper world wide and super abundant in sun-burnt Australia. The fossil fuel and minerals lobby certainly had a strangle hold on Australia and many other countries back then. Subsidies to fossil fuels globally were estimated by the IMF to top $5.2 Trillion in 20171 and fossil fuel money was pouring into disinformation, lobbying, and political campaigns around the world. Trump’s America was probably the worst case - in league with Putin’s Russian oligarchs. This was interconnected with growing inequality, which had reached epic proportions by 2020. Oxfam estimated that 26 individuals owned more than the poorest 50%2 in 2019. The .01% were in control and the wellbeing of the 88 | Solutions | Winter 2020 | www.thesolutionsjournal.com
broader population and future generations was not their major concern. GDP was growing, but the average person’s income, wellbeing, and life satisfaction were not. The planet and civilization was falling apart. There was an epidemic of pessimism, depression, and defeatism. But things were starting to change. In 2018 a few vanguard countries (Scotland, Iceland, and New Zealand) created the Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo) as part the larger global Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll3) to challenge the acceptance of GDP as the ultimate measure of a country’s success and replace it with the sustainable wellbeing of humans and the rest of nature as the core goal for all societies. Take a look at this archived TED talk4 that Nicola Sturgeon, then First Minister of Scotland, gave to kick off the network. WEAll was designed as a broad ‘network of networks’, aimed at bringing together the many organizations, governments, networks, academics, businesses, NGOs, and individuals that were already working on elements of the new economy. It was designed to coordinate, facilitate, amplify, and catalyse the wide range of ongoing efforts around the shared goal of creating a sustainable wellbeing economy, society, and planet. WEGo quickly grew to include Slovenia, Costa Rica, Sweden, Finland, Bhutan, and a few progressive states in the US including California, Colorado, Oregon, and Vermont. Annual summits quickly went from the WE3 to the WE7, WE20, and, by 2030, the WE90 while the G7 and G20 summits faded to insignificance. Wellbeing