Gaya Herrington: Why the goal should be meeting human needs within planetary boundaries rather than economic growth

<p>The world needs to move to a new economic system where growth is replaced as the ultimate goal by meeting human needs within ecological limits, argues Gaya Herrington.</p><p>Speaking in the <a href="https://www.interest.co.nz/of-interest-podcasts" target="_blank"><i><strong>Of Interest podcast</strong></i></a>Herrington explains how working at the Dutch central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank, during the Global Financial Crisis led to her realising how interconnected things were.</p><p>When subsequently studying sustainability at Harvard University, she decided to revisit the famous 1972 book by a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, <i>The Limits to Growth</i> for her thesis.</p><p>As Herrington, now Vice President for ESG Research at Schneider Electric, puts it, the book; "indicated that our peak welfare levels would be around now, globally. And we would have a choice to maintain it or go down." Her research found we are most closely aligned today with <i>The Limits to Growth authors'</i> business as usual scenario.</p><p>"Growing forever on a finite planet is simply not an option," she says.</p><p>We don't have a lot of time but do have an opportunity to align ourselves with something like the stabilised world scenario from the MIT team.</p><p>How would we do this, what will it mean and can we do it? A new economic system must, first and foremost, replace growth as the ultimate goal with something else.</p><p>"I think it should be meeting human needs within ecological limits. That doesn't mean you're anti-growth. If growth then contributes to human wellbeing and can do that with a low environmental impact, we'll still do it and if not we won't bother," says Herrington.</p><p>One way or another, she argues, growth will halt.</p><p>In the podcast she also talks about what she believes the "very loaded word collapse" would mean, what the world might be like if <i>The Limits to Growth</i> warning had been heeded in the 70s, what system dynamics is, the difference between needs and wants