A holy grail of environmental policy is an economy that delivers prosperity without requiring the ever-increasing consumption of raw materials.
Increasing incomes while reducing environmental pressures hinges on the “decoupling” of energy emissions from economic growth. Some countries in the global economy are moving in the right direction.
But this good news can be misleading. Our new study takes a long-term (50 years) look at the economy in over 100 countries, and an even longer-term look at the UK’s economy (over 150 years). Our findings are much less reassuring.
We used the most recent data for a measure called the material footprint. This counts everything a country actually consumes – including the resources extracted abroad to make its imports. To begin with the results were positive: 25 countries appear to have pulled off decoupled growth – the UK among them. Their GDP keeps climbing while their material use drifts downward.
But certain claims were being inflated in three ways. This is not to say green growth is impossible – only that the evidence claims too much.
1. Resource use isn’t falling enough
Economies are not getting to the safe limits we need to operate in. Imagine you owe £50,000 on credit cards. Last year your debt grew by £5,000; this year it grew by only £4,000. You’re improving. But you’re still going further into the hole every month, and the hole is already deep.
Marina Requena-i-Mora. Author’s own data based on the World Bank and UNEP IRP Global Material Flows Database
Researchers have estimated that a fair per-person share of the world’s materials would be somewhere between six and eight tonnes a year. The UK currently sits at more than double that range. Spain, Germany, Belgium are in similar territory. Their lines on the chart are bending downward, but from a level so high that it is premature to call them success stories. By contrast, Cuba and Somalia – alongside many other low- and middle-income country-years – fall within the sustainable-limit corridor, although at much lower income levels.
Read more:
Why ‘decoupling’ energy emissions from economic growth underpins the green transition
2. No global turning point
The overall picture across all 105 countries shows no turning point. As countries grow richer over time, resource use accelerates, especially at the very top of the income ladder.
Marina Requena-i-Mora. Author’s own data based on the World Bank and UNEP IRP Global Material Flows Database.
Repeat the exercise year by year, from 1970 to today, and the same upward-bending shape comes back. The promised downturn never arrives.
This suggests that the 25 success stories are exceptions rather than signs of a pattern other countries can follow as they grow. They are not being used as guides on the path we need to travel. They are outliers other countries may be avoiding.
The successes also have multiple origin stories. The European declines mostly track the 2008 financial crash and the housing bust that followed, not a quiet technological revolution.
Some commodity exporters look greener because high prices lifted their GDP while their domestic construction stayed flat. Cuba kept material use modest while GDP per person rose, through decades of agroecology and urban farming.
Taken together, these cases do not show the kind of smooth technological improvement imagined in green-growth narratives. The declines come from different historical processes: crisis, housing busts, price effects, and specific political choices, rather than a general global shift toward cleaner production.
3. The dip is just a blip
The third problem is time. Direct material footprint records only go back to 1970. Britain has rich historical data on material use but also on trade, household spending and investment, and we used those to reconstruct the UK’s material footprint all the way back to 1875. The neat downward bend you see if you start in 1990 vanishes.
Across nearly a century and a half, the relationship between British incomes and resource use is essentially a straight line going up. The current dip has happened before. It may just be a prelude to further coupled growth: a blip on a long upward climb.
Marina Requena-i-Mora. Figure based on data from Bank of England, UNEP IRP, Streeck et al. (2020),The Maddison Project
It’s not that rich countries have done nothing. Real efforts have been made, and recent lines on the chart do go in the right direction. But what if they are wobbles, not turns. What if they do not bring countries below safe limits? What if they are not effective models for other countries to follow?
To make real progress, countries consuming above a fair, sustainable share of the world’s materials – the UK among them – need to cut consumption in absolute terms, not just slow its rise. And it is possible: a few countries, including Cuba and Somalia, have reduced material use while incomes rose, within those limits.
Quite how they manage it varies and deserves closer study, but it shows the goal is real. The way forward is to measure growth and resource use honestly – over long horizons and against real limits.
