Financial and environmental crises are feeding off each other, creating a new global poverty-environment trap, with little hope of disruption under the current system.
According to a new paper published by Professor Andreas Antoniades at the University of Sussex, Breaking the Cycle: Financial Stress, Unsustainable Growth, and the Transition to Sustainability, countries are facing growing financial stresses brought about by rising debt, slowing growth, and climate mitigation or recovery expenses.
In turn, this is fuelling increased poverty levels, reducing the capacity to invest in social and environmental solutions and resilience. The result then leaves the state even more vulnerable to the original catalysts.
Governments across the globe are now looking to high growth, export-led and resource-intensive strategies to deliver quick economic relief. The problem is, such approaches only intensify and expedite the climate decline and ecological degradation.
Again, this leaves nations, businesses and households even more susceptible to the conditions that first triggered this downward spiral. Fiscal and nature pressures are essentially intensifying each other, creating a new ‘global poverty-environment’ trap.
According to the study, traditional economic adjustment programmes are no longer enough to overcome the challenges. Instead, debt relief, sustainability adjustment programmes, and ongoing investment in green, resilient infrastructure must be deployed before the pattern becomes entrenched.
‘Our dominant crisis-response model treats the economy and environment as separate domains, but this approach traps societies in a vicious cycle of debt, poverty and ecological decline,’ said Professor Antoniades. ‘We need to stop thinking in terms of ‘fix the economy first, worry about the environment later’. That paradigm is not only outdated, but also dangerous.’
Image: Art Institute of Chicago / Unsplash
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