Ensuring Equality and Prosperity for All
The Global Justice Report attempts to set out a new vision for global progress in the 21st century: grounding human development and equality in planetary habitability. It explores the conditions under which the world could move toward this horizon and traces an economically and ecologically consistent transition path from 2026 to 2100.
Its main conclusion is simple: it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all, but only if the transformation rests on three pillars simultaneously. Fast decarbonization of energy systems is necessary. But we also need a major shift toward sufficiency – understood as a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint and large changes in consumption patterns, food habits, land use, and forest cover. In addition, neither decarbonization nor sufficiency can be financed and politically sustained without a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, both between countries and within them. The compression of global inequality is not only compatible with deep decarbonization; it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.
The Global Justice Report is the first attempt to propose a fully quantified plan going in this direction, combining four dimensions that today's debates often treat separately: redistribution at the world scale, a deep reform of the international financial and economic order, a radical transformation of energy systems, and substantial shifts in consumption patterns. Compared to most climate scenarios, including by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main novelty is that we model all four dimensions together and place inequality and sufficiency at the center of the analysis.
Working Less, Achieving Gender Equality
The first element of sufficiency in the Global Justice Platform is a large reduction in working hours: from about 2,100 hours to 1,000 hours per year per employed person, between 2025 and 2100 (Figure 2). As observed in historical episodes of working-time reduction, productivity growth makes such reductions possible.
Compressing the Income and Wealth Scale
The Global Justice Platform aims at substantial compression of national income and wealth scales over 2026-2100. Global wealth and income taxes are designed both to raise the resources needed by the Global Justice Fund and to curb the concentration of income, wealth, and power at the top of the world distribution.