However, existing modelled scenarios find that sufficient absolute decoupling is not feasible. Recognizing these problems, the dominant policy response for the past half century has been to call for “green growth”, hoping that GDP can be absolutely decoupled from resource and energy use such that income can continue to rise while resource use declines to sustainable levels. Additionally, ecological overshoot is being driven overwhelmingly by high-income countries who rely on a large net appropriation of resources from the rest of the world, achieved through patterns of unequal exchange in international trade. This rising energy use makes rapid decarbonization more difficult to achieve, while rising resource use is driving ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss.

Empirical research has demonstrated that GDP growth is tightly coupled to resource and energy use. Papers A New Political Economy for a Healthy PlanetĪbstract: The global economy, which is organized around and dependent on perpetual expansion or “growth”, is presently overshooting several critical planetary boundaries – not only in terms of climate change, but also land-use change, biogeochemical flows, chemical pollution and species extinction. It has been made possible through a grant by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). This curated collection of ideas captures, interrogates, and elevates alternative paradigms of the human-nature relationship - existing and new, and from various disciplines and societies – creating a space to recast our relationship with the environment and inform future policymaking. Biology and ecosystems research offer non-anthropocentric models for sustainable coexistence, while astrophysics can shift the starting point for many of these conversations, moving beyond the human-environment binary as we identify potentially infinite forms of life. Legal scholars and some states are exploring how the environment and the interests of future generations might be given a legal personality, alongside contemporary humans.

Paradigm shifts may also come from innovations in more traditional domains. Forms of traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous knowledge propose sophisticated and deeply symbiotic frameworks that can also broaden understandings through key ideas such as reciprocity and intergenerational fairness. Widely differing religious practices offer a range of environmental ethics that could underpin a shift in how the human-nature relationship is conceptualized.

The sources of alternative paradigms are both extraordinarily diverse and still unfamiliar to most. Current public discourse features limited propositions to tackle pollution, biodiversity loss, and the degradation of our natural environment - the triple planetary crisis that threatens humanity. Most proposals by the world’s largest emitters remain framed by longstanding models of infinite growth, exploitative energy production, and a belief that human survival will come by way of technological innovation. There remains a significant gap between the urgency of the challenges facing humanity and the willingness to undertake the kind of radical action necessary to collectively shift towards more sustainable forms of consumption. Just as it did in 1972, Stockholm+50 can help broaden public discourse by inviting alternative thinking, models, conceptions, and solutions to the environmental challenges of our day. It is an opportunity to take stock of the progress achieved in the 50 years since the 1972 Conference on the Human Environment, and instigate serious reflection on today’s environmental crisis. Stockholm+50 is a commemoration and a time for reflection on the interconnectedness of humans and the environment. This “Reimagining the Human-Environment Relationship” project is an opportunity to recognize other interesting and valid cosmologies, based on the belief that a sincere engagement with them will introduce ideas into the public discourse and, through such engagement, hopefully evolve a new ethics for human well-being. In the lead-up to Stockholm+50, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) partnered with UN University Centre for Policy Research (UNU-CPR) on an initiative to capture, interrogate, and bring in alternative voices into the global policy to create space for alternative, transformative paradigms that recast our relationship with the environment. Reimagining the Human-Environment Relationship

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