The radical plan to rethink work, wealth and planetary well-being

A group of more than 40 researchers spent 20 months devising a plan for the world to achieve ecological sustainability within planetary boundaries, all while seeing incomes rise for 98% of the global population and reducing working hours for everybody by half to two and a half days a week. The plan to achieve this by 2100 is laid out in the recent "Global Justice Report."

If it sounds utopian, Lucas Chancel, the co-director of the World Inequality Lab and editor of the report, is the first person to acknowledge this, but explains why it's not only possible — there's even historical precedent for many of the measures the report outlines.

Achieving this plan rests on three pillars: decarbonization and the energy transition; a shift towards "sufficiency," defined here as the reduction of labor and production of superfluous products not needed for human survival; and a "drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power."

"Basically, our plan is thought in a way that it can work with [an] incomplete coalition of actors," he says. "That is, you can start to implement it even though you don't have a global wealth tax. But our argument is that progressively, more and more countries [are] doing exactly these things."

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Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

Cover image: Bay near Pulau Rayo, Raja Ampat, Indonesia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

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Timecodes

(00:00) A habitable, equitable world is possible

(14:19) How we accomplish it

(30:56) Rebutting the arguments against it

(40:15) 98% of the world would see their income rise

(44:55) Gender equality is at the heart of it