Leadership towards an ethical and sustainable future

The IES opinion piece 'Expanding the ethical envelope for a sustainable future' addressed the expansion, but also examples of contraction, of humanity’s ethical envelope throughout history to address wider human constituencies, also considering its further extension to ecosystems and the future. 

Continued expansion of the ethical envelope and its necessary institutionalisation into robust policy instruments is vital to halt and, ideally, reverse damage to future prospects wrought today by embedded neoclassical norms. These norms are substantially blind to such perceived ‘externalities’ as the vitality of the ecosystems that support human needs and the cohesion of communities. Broader ethical considerations can instead form a basis for halting ongoing degradation, and then the subsequent regeneration, of supportive environmental processes and social integrity.

However, four decades on from global agreement about the bold and very clear intergenerational commitment within the 1987 ‘Brundtland Definition’ of sustainable development – “…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”¹ – the world is still exhibiting intense hypocrisy. Embedded neoclassical norms still actively support anachronistic technologies and products (petrochemical dependence, disposable plastics, input-intensive farming) and their underlying vested interests. This is despite robust evidence about how they are serially undermining climate stability, ecosystem integrity and the natural processes upon which current and future prospects depend. The asymmetric distribution of short-term benefits to the few with costs vested on the many now and into the future is a clear case of sanctioned social inequity.

Political leadership or regression

The task of political leadership is complex. Politicians are required to balance current and popular demands — which are often built on anachronistic expectations — with the vision and bold decisions that are essential to take account of future trajectories and needs.  
This difficulty is compounded by short-term electoral cycles that tend to prioritise quick wins against responsible action to address longer-term issues such as resilient infrastructure, climate change, halting the decline of biodiversity, and the transition to an economy framed around wellbeing as opposed to the narrow financial blinkering of GDP.  

Today, the world is regrettably far from short of examples of retrograde or lax policies locking much of global society into polluting and resource-depleting norms. These perpetuate flows of benefits to a small subset of influential vested interests, whilst unjustly imposing costs and consequences on less powerful constituencies particularly including voiceless and voteless future generations. Worse still are the frequent instances of reneging on or serial delays in addressing former commitments and consensus around global goals and responses to common threats to the continuing wellbeing of humanity and the ecosystems that support us.

Subsidies versus stated commitments

A gross and flagrant example of disregard for the future, and of hypocrisy with respect to stated commitments to sustainable development, is seen in the massive disparity in taxpayer resources that governments allocate to perpetuating petrochemical dependence, when compared with support for renewable energy that forms a central plank of future needs. This is despite a depth of knowledge and near-global consensus about the destructive consequences of perpetuating emissions of climate-active gases. Given the pressing nature and dire prognosis of current destabilisation of the climate and degradation of biodiversity, the wise promotion of transition to future-focused technologies must surely be an urgent priority of any responsible and informed government. The evidence is clear that the global political system does not heed the urgency of such a systemic change.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that global fossil fuel subsidies amounted to about US$7 trillion in 2022, representing 7.1% of global GDP.² Approximately 18% of this comprises explicit subsidies such as fuel sold below supply cost, and nearly 60% arises from failure to price damages associated with climate change and local air pollution.  

This vast investment in perpetuating fossil fuel dependency contrasts with global direct financial support and policy subsidies for renewable energy generation and integration that, though expanding, stood at roughly $168 billion annually across the G20 nations by 2023.³ Broader global estimates for clean energy financial mechanisms exceed several hundred billion dollars per year. 

Manifestly, support for clean energy continues to be outpaced by at least an order of magnitude by subsidies for global fossil fuel consumption and use.⁴ There is a wide divergence between strident rhetoric about the priority of working towards a sustainable pathway of development and halting climate change with these scales of government support. (Pro-sustainable rhetoric is not a feature of some pariah, self-regarding nations such as post-2025 USA, whose current administration has no evident concern for impacts over space and time.) This disparity between stated commitments and contradictory incentives is an offence vested upon the silent majority of humanity, and in particular the invisible constituency of future generations upon whom ever-deepening jeopardy and lost opportunities for life fulfilment are being imposed.

The perceived and actual costs of pro-sustainable action

Too often, political protestations, such as the claim that “The cost of addressing net zero is too great”, deny the clear analysis of the UK’s 2006 Stern Review of the economics of climate change that "The benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting" and that "Delay would be dangerous and much more costly".⁵

More egregious still is that immediate returns appear to matter more than the well-understood consequences that stem from failure to act boldly to realise the benefits of addressing climatic, biodiversity and pollution issues: a triple planetary crisis. It is imperative to recognise these as strategic emergencies that already inevitably blight prospects for younger and future generations, not to mention ultimately extinguishing decent returns on sunk business investments.⁶  

As one example, an authoritative 2025 report concluded that current climate trajectories point toward a 50% contraction of global GDP between 2070 and 2090, with a plausible nearer-term scenario of a 15 to 20% drop in a single five-year window. This represents a shock larger than the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis combined, which, if not checked, will see “mass mortality, mass displacement, severe economic contraction and conflict become more likely” suggesting the death of around 4 billion people in the process of collapse.⁷ 

The implications are massive, solidly evidenced and stark, yet they have still to incite anything remotely approaching proportionate action, or even heightened political and public alarm.

The necessary synergy between policy and corporate innovation

Despite political hesitancy to ‘impose more red tape’, or indeed an instinct to slash it, businesses typically seek policy certainty and clear strategic direction rather than regulatory ambiguity. In reality, predictable governance frameworks provide confidence and reduce investment risk in innovations that are better able to address human needs in a future that businesses accept will inevitably differ from today.^{8, 9} 

Climate change, biodiversity decline, issues of equity and other changes in the operating environment affecting societal opportunities and restrictions will increasingly shape future resource availability, freedoms to operate and market conditions. Innovation then, buoyed by confidence to invest in step-changes, is essential to find novel and more efficient ways to continue to meet society’s needs in a constantly changing future. Clear political signals about ‘directions of travel’ are vital to provide this confidence to investors.  

The benefits of bold, pro-sustainable policy driving innovation, coincidentally also reducing environmental burdens and dependence on imports, is exemplified by Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition). The Energiewende is widely regarded as a landmark example of systemic energy transformation that, over two-and-a-half decades, led from a baseline in 2000 of just 6.3% of Germany’s electricity deriving from renewable sources towards more than 55% by 2025. This change was driven by such clear-sighted policy interventions as the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG), large-scale investment in wind and solar power, and a strategic commitment to improving energy security through domestic renewable resources rather than reliance on imported fossil fuels.¹⁰ Political leadership in concert with business innovations is required to achieve such substantial transitions.

Evaluation and representation of policy and practice

The triad of ecology, economy, and society is well-known and widely accepted as representing key dimensions of sustainable development. However, the ‘weak sustainability’ interpretation regarding these facets as semi-autonomous can, and regrettably often does, lead to misunderstandings and trade-offs assuming substitutability that undermines supporting ecosystems, social integrity and cohesion. This, in turn, drives unsustainable outcomes.  

Money talks loudly in a political economy wedded to the neoclassical paradigm, within which narrow pursuit of profit drowns out (or wholly externalises) negative implications for the foundational environmental and social resources upon which future societal, ecological and economic success depends. Within this paradigm, simplistic GDP-based arithmetic is often tacitly assumed to represent societal value whilst almost totally externalising societal and environmental consequences.  This financially blinkered approach is wholly insufficient to measure societal progress, and it also largely overlooks inherent investment risks arising from feedback from degradation of the socioecological system.

What, then, does it take to support policy makers and other decision makers in informing systemic judgements within this political economy setting? How best can we integrate balanced consideration of ramifications for people and supporting ecosystems over space and time into the evaluation of proposals and options founded on established ‘rational’ economic thinking that already addresses factors such as return on investment? In a market-driven society, an alternative, broader approach is necessary to evaluate financial risk and the net benefit of options and decisions.

For this purpose, it is more useful to use an alternative triad – ecology-humanity-time – as a test for the outcomes of policies and practices that are already considered in financial terms. In simplistic terms, Figure 1 provides intuitive visualisations (that are not dependent on detailed data) of how different approaches can be assessed and presented.

• Figure 1a) illustrates the intent, if not the resulting compromises in implementation, of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015¹¹  for which consequences for people and ecosystems are implicit and ramifications over time are central considerations;
• Figure 1b) illustrates the aim of the UK’s Biodiversity Net Gain regulations, which do not include consideration of social impacts but intend to contribute to nature recovery in built development schemes though in practice more often mitigate environmental damage rather than driving regeneration. There are also longer-term (30-year) horizons for on-site and off-site modifications and offsets addressing an intermediate future;¹² and
• Figure 1c) illustrates consequences of the post-2025 second Trump presidency’s suppression of all references to climate change across US government websites, and cancellation of both DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion) programmes and foreign aid, in pursuit of anachronistic ‘reindustrialisation’ and a politics of ‘America First’. These measures favour vested neoclassical interests, and the perpetuation of resource uses known to be environmentally destructive, with little or no regard for environmental and social implications now or tomorrow.