Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

It was in 2022 when the IPCC first mentioned Degrowth and sufficiency in its reports. It is a significant move considering that most IPCC member states still struggle from meeting basic human needs. However, there are many sections in IPCC products that indicate that growth imperatives make meeting ambitious climate goals extremely challenging or risky. An important risk is that pathways towards ambitious climate goals within the growth paradigm, may in the end shift the problems to biodiversity, resource depletion of rare earth minerals and others, microplastics, man-made material exceeding living material, PFAS increase and the like. At the same time, it is questionable how much economic growth has managed to increase our well-being in developed economies in recent decades. With increasingly elaborate planned obsolescence, ever faster and more obscure fashion forcing consumption on us, and with marketing employing more psychologists to rewire our brains and make us addicted to health-damaging consumptions than we have to cure these ailments, it is a question if it is worth it. On the other hand, there are shocking inequalities in emissions, and it is a serious question if we can solve the climate crisis without reducing this inequality. Moving away from our addiction to growth could improve the quality of life for many in the overconsuming North, and can leave more carbon space for the global South to flourish. Degrowth scholarship also needs to consider that the proposed measures for redistribution do not reproduce the mistakes of our communist past as ample evidence shows that some egalitarian measures in the past resulted in even worse resource use and pollution, while others economized resource use.

Info

Day: 2023-08-29
Start time: 18:30
Duration: 01:30
Room: MSU-Gorgona
Type: Special Session
Theme: Keynote

Links:

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