The new environmental economics: sustainability and justice

As the landmark passage of the UN General Assembly resolution declaring access to a clean and healthy environment a universal human right demonstrates, there is growing global recognition of the negative impact of environmental degradation on human-made systems (e.g., cities, agriculture, infrastructures), and vice versa. Yet alongside the human impacts and consequences of the biosphere’s current destruction, including energy insecurity, energy poverty, cost of living crises, and rapidly increasing extreme weather events, comes an opportunity to rethink the economic logic underpinning our global social systems. The case has never been clearer. Without proper mitigation, contemporary ecological crises have the potential over the next fifty years to nullify the considerable progress of the last fifty made in human wellbeing and scientific knowledge, for example.

However, the enormity of such challenges cannot be understood, let alone addressed, with mainstream economic tools that are steeped in policy thinking of the past: namely, that GDP growth, conceived in the 1930s, should be the central aim of policy. A growth-centric economy has fallen well short of mitigating the major twin crises of the early 21^st century – the inequality crisis and the ecological crisis – precisely because growth-based logic ignores both. In his book, The New Environmental Economics: Sustainability and Justice, author Eloi Laurent argues that the way forward must be a justice-oriented approach that puts human well-being at the center of policy and all levels of governance.

Laurent offers a new integrated environmental economics to readers, guided by ethical principles and planetary limits, that is equipped to address a key interconnection of our time: the sustainability–justice nexus. For Laurent, the old neo-classical school of environmental economics is unfit to address this central concern precisely because it was never designed with justice in mind. Laurent instead presents a consistent social-ecological approach that situates the Anthropocene as an age where social systems rule natural systems. His analysis reveals how interconnected social dynamics, such as inequality, cause environmental degradations and, conversely, how structural environmental inequalities can lead to lasting and severe damage for the socially disadvantaged, thus perpetuating and deepening injustice. He argues it is impossible to fully grasp sustainability issues without first coming to terms with its deeply interconnected justice issues (i.e., we must change what we measure), and second, without policymakers thinking about social and ecological questions together (i.e., reforming the what and how of inequality and climate interventions).

Rejecting economic growth as a broken compass for policy, Laurent emphasizes the urgent need for a well-being, or social-ecological, transition. This would involve a refocusing of global, national, and local policy on human well-being under severe and increasing ecological constraints. He argues that social-ecological indicators based on the concept of well-being (e.g., life expectancy, resilience, education, and employment attainment) are a much better compass to guide the transition to a low-carbon, just society. The social-ecological transition Laurent posits requires an understanding of the ways in which capitalism, democracy, globalization, and digitalization – and their specific institutional contexts – interact, coupled with a social-ecology analysis and policy mindset. Namely, to go beyond mainstream economics, a central question for policymakers, scholars, citizens, and decisionmakers alike is how best to change policy approaches to be in step with new well-being indicators by addressing two key challenges. First, by connecting wellbeing to sustainability by focusing on health, and second, by embedding new wellbeing- and justice-focused indicators into policies and institutions. Rather than merely suggesting tweaks to the status quo, the book equips readers with the analytical tools to grasp the plurality of approaches to environmental justice. It demonstrates that a whole new set of assumptions are required, including new methods, instruments, and policy standards.

Unpacking the alleged trade-off between social and environmental goals, Laurent shows that progress is possible while balancing the two goals. The book’s analyses of cases from around the world (e.g., biodiversity and ecosystems, pollution and waste, energy and climate change, well-being and the environment, and urban sustainability) all point to a need to urgently move our economic systems from a logic of trade-offs to a logic of synergies between our environment and our well-being. Laurent argues that swift policy change in this direction is within our reach, but we must refocus and accelerate international negotiations and identify and mitigate key social drivers of climate change, including population growth, wealth and income distributional issues, energy innovation barriers, and the carbon intensity of world’s economies.

Laurent argues that policy instruments should focus on changing behaviors and attitudes in order to improve outcomes. However, we can’t get there with economics and policy alone. He concludes the transition must be supported by a new social-ecological state, reformed for the 21^st century. Given that social risk today is interconnected, complex, transboundary, and includes a major environmental dimension (floods, heat waves, storms, pollutants), Laurent urges that the new social-ecological state must abandon the closed, narrow approach of the past based on efficiency and economic growth and be motivated instead by a broader focus on climate mitigation and investment to alleviate inequality. Both will generate cumulative savings and improve wellbeing. Central to this is building institutions capable of guaranteeing social-ecological progress by recognizing the ecological dimension within social issues and revealing the social dimension of ecological issues.

In short, Laurent’s book makes an important contribution to discussions exploring concrete ways to realize the well-being transition and a just, sustainable future. It is an essential read for scholars, economists, educators, policymakers, and decisionmakers to gain the indicators, analyses, approaches, and policy tools to understand and eventually face the complex social and ecological challenges of the 21^st century. Laurent’s integrated approach to economics gives us alternatives to measure, value, and improve human well-being, and, doing so, provides the necessary levers to forge policy capable of aligning social issues and environmental challenges.