|
OPINION - By Bruno COLMANT, Ph.D., Member of the Royal Academy of Belgium
As I mistakenly believed for too long, we can no longer dissociate economics and ecology because the greed of consumption and enrichment leads to the destruction of nature. This is not yet integrated into the financial markets, whose required returns and time horizons seem incompatible with planetary limits.
Economic ecology has highlighted the ecological unsustainability of current production and consumption patterns. How can we reconcile a planet with a natural growth rate of 2-3% (which medieval thinkers likened to the natural rate of interest, about the average annual growth of plants) when capital demands an annual return of around 10%? As the American economist...
|