We welcome Doughnut economics legend Kate Raworth onto the show. Kate talks us through the successes and challenges facing the adoption of doughnut economics over the last seven years, gives advice on how to better communicate the ideas of ecological economics, and gives her take on the key public policies for getting us closer to a life within the doughnut. Hosted by Sophus zu Ermgassen. Edited by Aidan Knox.

It is often argued that it was market-based capitalism that made agriculture so efficient that it enabled the eradication of hunger globally. This claim is shadowed by the incredible environmental degradation that was caused by industrial agriculture in the last centuries. Hence, due demand arises that we should keep the world fed through sustainable means. Our guest today, Pablo Tittonell claims that this is possible through agroecology where we combine agricultural and ecological knowledge...

Ecological economists need to pull all sorts of leverage points to enable a just future in which the economy flourishes within planetary boundaries. One of the leverage points that is receiving increasing attention is climate and nature litigation. But what do we as community need to know about climate litigation, historical responsibility for climate change, and how litigation works in practice? We welcome Dr Benjamin Franta onto the show to discuss all things related to climate litigation....

Today’s guest, Robert Costanza is hardly unknown to anyone who is vaguely familiar with ecological economics. While we could fill entire seasons discussing the topics he has covered in his works, in this episode we are discussing his latest book: Addicted to Growth: Societal Therapy for a Sustainable Wellbeing Future where he applies the analogy of addiction to our contemporary problems. Humanity is addicted to economic growth and like true addicts, even if we accept that it is ruining us by...

Some key mainstream critiques of postgrowth economics revolve around labour, and what the labour market would look like in a postgrowth economy, with the common perception being that economic contraction tends to be associated with unemployment, and therefore that a postgrowth economy is socially unsustainable. But, if we are to transition to a postgrowth world for ecological reasons or because of secular stagnation, ecological economics needs to present a compelling story about what people’s...

Over the last decades, burning wood for energy has expanded in the EU, as have proposals for implementing Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). The origins of this questionable boom can be found in accounting loopholes, which allow burning woody biomass to be classed as carbon neutral and BECCS as carbon negative. Based on these loopholes and large lobby power, (woody) biomass has received generous subsidies and been counted towards renewable energy targets in the EU. A large...

When it comes to environmental issues, it is crucial that policymakers rely on scientific evidence, while scientists become conscious of how important it is to provide relevant and comprehensive information on their work to policymakers. In our ambiguous post-truth world, this is no trivial challenge. Today’s guest, Eszter Kelemen tells us about the current state of affairs in science-policy interface and the challenges that this encumbered liaison poses not just to both sides but to...

Ecological economics has a long tradition of disputing the mainstream economic view that people’s concern for the environment scales with income, and that it’s a luxury good. The main counterargument is the widespread evidence on environmental justice conflicts, encapsulated by what Joan Martinez-Alier called the ‘environmentalism of the poor’. Today, we focus on the role and importance of people working on the front lines of environmental degradation – biosphere defenders. Our guest today is...

When we say, “Money cannot buy conscience”, in today’s economy, we could not be further from the truth. Our current economy can turn absolutely anything into financial assets. Even irresponsible behaviour. A company that is incapable of reducing its carbon emission can just buy carbon credits and continue business-as-usual. Another that is about to ruin a habitat can offset its wrongdoing by paying money to someone else to save another habitat somewhere else. While these solutions may make...

There are huge inequalities in the world when it comes to releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Some countries have disproportionately contributed to the climate crisis and keep aggravating their climate debt. In the language of climate coloniality, these countries could owe reparation payments to low-emitting nations. But can we calculate who owes whom how much? And should we calculate it? Today’s guest, Andrew Fanning together with Jason Hickel recently published a paper aiming to answer...

The myth of green growth surrounds us wherever we look. Eco-modernisation’s promise that technological fixes will provide us with the efficiency we need to decouple environmental burdens from economic growth suggests that business-as-usual can continue. Today’s guest Timothée Parrique is the best to explain why this is not happening and why relying solely on technological solutions is like betting on green zero in roulette. Hosted by Alexandra Köves. Edited by Aidan Knox.

There’s a long history of states solving major social challenges through ambitious and mission-driven public policy, such as getting a person on the moon, or the foundation of the UK’s national health service. But the last few decades have seen declines in the ambition and entrepreneurship of the state, at a time when global sustainability challenges have called for more and better leadership. How did this happen, why is this a problem for implementing policies consistent with the goals of...

The world as we know it now is built on a history of colonisation and even today massive parts of the world are being economically and culturally colonised. Our guest today, Roland Nkwain Ngam believes that hegemonic capitalism is both the creator and consequence of the brutal exploitation of black, brown and white bodies, women’s backs, nature and all the commons that we were all meant to enjoy equally. As the ecological crisis we are witnessing today is a direct consequence of hegemonic...

Currently markets determine most of what happens around us. But markets have no morals: everything is up for grabs. If you have the money, you can turn wetlands, forests, or any other biodiversity rich areas into mono-cultural agricultural lands, human habitats, or mines in the name of development. But can we and should we compensate this by making the developers pay for biodiversity conservation somewhere else? This is the central question around biodiversity offsetting and in his research,...

Today’s show is one for the ecological economics lecturers out there – it’s about the joy of teaching ecological economics, the ‘aha’ moments when your students see the world in a new way, and how to teach really really well. We welcome Corinne Baulcomb onto the show, Director of one of Europe’s largest EE programmes at SRUC/University of Edinburgh, sharing her experiences over the last decade of teaching EE’s beautiful ideas to the next generation of thinkers.

Various global initiatives have emerged to try to address the degradation of the living world, but despite decades of implementation we’ve had limited success at changing that trajectory. Why? Dr Niak Koh is a sustainability scientist based at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. In some of her recent work, Niak has focused on what biodiversity agreements can learn from the implementation of international human rights agreements, which have historically been more...

It is now well-established that contemporary society has finite ecological constraints, and massive inequality in wealth, wellbeing and carbon consumption. But how is the consumption of our shared ecological space distributed across society, and what’s the ecological efficiency through which today’s economy generates improvements in wellbeing? In this episode host, Sophus zu Ermgassen welcomes Dr Marta Baltruszewicz, who has led some fascinating research empirically exploring interlinkages...

The fundamental purpose of ecological economics is to deliver an economy that achieves high living standards for all within the constraints of the Earth system. There is arguably no economic sector which is more consequential for this vision than the food system, and perhaps the greatest sustainability challenge of the coming decades is the question of how to deliver quality nutrition for all, whilst minimising the biodiversity and carbon impacts of one of the most ecologically impactful...

Ecological economics is all about staying within planetary boundaries while providing prosperity for all. This, however, means that we desperately need to transcend both our growth-centred worldview and our fully growth-dependent economic and social systems. The solutions proposed by ecological economics cover messages of true political nature. While bottom-up initiatives are incredibly important in this transition, drastic top-down policy changes would make a massive difference. Our guest...

Talking about ecological economics often invokes the mentioning of limits. Ecological and social limits to growth are often brought up in the context where we need to respect these external boundaries and restrain ourselves accordingly. Today’s guest, Giorgos Kallis in his book Limits puts forward an unusual but compelling argument that instead of seeing a world where human wants are unlimited and the environment limits them, we should start seeing a world where human desires are limited, and...

The sustainability transition ecological economists urge would mean that we radically transform our economies and societies. Such a transformation is not without disruptions and therefore we need tools to make it just. Our guest today, Vincent Liegey argues that the Unconditional Autonomy Allowance, in which all citizens are provided with guarantees to a minimum sustenance without any conditionality is just the tool we need in Degrowth transitions. It not only mitigates the insecurities...

A key focus of ecological economics is studying the role of energy in the economy. What role does energy play in economic production? What happens when the economy becomes more energy efficient? What fundamental relationships do the IPCC decarbonisation models get wrong, that leads to radically different visions for how to decarbonise our economies? Join us with Dr Paul Brockway who has spent much of the last decade thinking about the decarbonisation of energy systems for a guide through what...

In our podcast series we have already covered many different perspectives on the necessary transformation of the monetary system to establish an ecologically sustainable and socially just world. Our guest today, Joe Ament argues that thinking about money differently allows us to think differently about sustainability. Much of our worldview on money is that it is a commodity and is therefore limited. Thinking instead that money is a social relation allows us to think of it as something not...

As of 2020, the physical mass of all the world’s man-made structures exceeded that of all the world’s living things. And there’s raw materials – sand and construction minerals - at the heart of these structures, but we rarely notice them, or think about where they come from. In this episode we speak with Dr Aurora Torres, one of the leading experts in the sustainability implications of society’s hunger for sand and construction minerals, and explore the ecological economics of the sand supply...