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Author for correspondence: J. Timmons Roberts, E-mail: [email protected]. †
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New piece lays out research agenda for national development that advances human well-being while deeply cutting emissions.
1. Introduction
A key challenge of climate change is that past economic expansion has been fuelled by relatively cheap and abundant fossil energy. Some countries, however, have achieved high levels of well-being at relatively low levels of carbon emissions; learning from these countries may enable us to understand key features of feasible and desirable development pathways for different groups of countries.
These countries show that it is possible to achieve human well-being (as measured by both objective indicators such as high life expectancy and literacy rates and subjective measures such as life satisfaction) with rather moderate national levels of carbon emissions or other stressors on the environment (Dietz et al., 2009, 2012; Jorgenson, 2014; Knight & Rosa, 2011; Mazur & Rosa, 1974; Steinberger et al., 2012). Nations vary dramatically from one another in how effective they are at converting resources into well-being, and a diverse group of nations with moderate levels of resource consumption have relatively high objective and subjective well-being, whether measured by direct or trade-adjusted emissions at the national level (Dietz et al., 2009, 2012; Givens, 2017, 2018; Jorgenson, 2014; Jorgenson et al., 2018; Knight & Rosa, 2011; Lamb et al., 2014; Mazur & Rosa, 1974; O'Neill et al., 2018; Steinberger & Roberts, 2010; Steinberger et al., 2012). Though there are important caveats in transferring lessons across nations and variations in efficiency of delivering well-being even within nations (Geronimus et al., 2001; Otto et al., 2019), these findings suggest that there are routes to improving well-being that do not rely on expanding emissions beyond a modest threshold, and hence could be consistent with the rapid decarbonization required for avoiding dangerous warming levels (Grubler et al., 2018; IPCC, 2018). The urgency of this work is clear from recent studies confirming that even moderate emissions create stresses that are already sufficient to breach planetary boundaries (IPCC, 2018; O'Neill et al., 2018),
In 2015 nearly all of the world's nations developed and submitted pledged actions on climate change (‘Intended Nationally-Determined Contributions' – INDCs) for the...