Get Involved

The OPEN:EU invites organisations with shared goals to participate with us, so as to strengthen the One Planet Economy concept and hasten our transition to a more sustainable world.

One Planet Thinking

The conclusion of WWF’s most recent Living Planet Report (2008) is that we are now living in severe ecological overshoot. Worldwide, people are consuming about 30% more natural resources than the planet can replace.

We are living on ecological credit, drawing down the stock of natural capital while our overall consumption exceeds the planet’s ecological limits. As with an increasing bank overdraft, this cannot go on for ever: it is clear that a step change is needed.

In a One Planet Economy, we will be living in a world that will certainly be different from the one we live now. In order to prevent a 2 degree Celsius rise in global average tempertaures we would have globally decarbonised our economies. We would have also significantly dematerialised them as well with products being built with resource efficiency, re-use and recycling in mind.

Some elements of a One Planet Economy might, for a few more years, appear quite radical. For all the new opportunities, this is also an agenda with some costs. It requires investment. For those who equate their quality of life with extravagant use of resources, change could be unwelcome. Political leaders will need the strength to mobilise support for action that will not always benefit voters within the timeframes of parliamentary elections. They will also need the tenacity to see such actions through.

Global Perspective

Our planet is buckling under the weight of the demands we are making on it. The world’s population is set to increase to nine billion by 2050 and global consumption levels are already five times what they were just 50 years ago. This overconsumption is leading directly to climate change and species extinctions. We are losing some of the world’s richest forests; we are degrading soil and sources of fresh water faster than ever before.

While we in the West we live as if we had three planet Earths or more, two billion people live on less than two dollars a day. While the average British person uses about 150 litres of pure water each day, over a billion people have no access to clean water at all. Yet the consequences of our overconsumption already fall most heavily on the poorest countries. The impacts on human societies across the world will continue to worsen unless we make some rapid changes. Sir Nicholas Stern, a former World Bank chief economist, argued in his 2006 Review on the Economics of Climate Change that “business as usual” could cause economic impacts greater in scale than the two world wars and the Great Depression put together.

The choices we make today will shape our opportunities far into the future. The cities, power stations and homes we build today could lock human society into wasteful use of energy and other resources beyond our lifetimes. Or they could begin to propel us and future generations towards a new way of more balanced living.

The European Economy

Today, Europe uses 20 per cent of what the world’s ecosystems provide and yet is home to only 7 per cent of the world population.