Around 40 percent of the world’s agricultural land is now seriously degraded, and by 2025 two out of three people worldwide will live in water-stress… - Kate Raworth

drop the economist’s beloved notion of ‘externalities’, those incidental effects felt by people who were not involved in the transactions that produced them — such as toxic effluent that affects communities living downstream of a river-polluting factory, or the exhaust fumes inhaled by cyclists biking through city traffic. Such negative externalities, remarks the ecological economist Herman Daly, are those things that ‘we classify as “external” costs for no better reason than because we have made no provision for them in our economic theories’.21 The systems dynamics expert John Sterman concurs. ‘There are no side effects — just effects,’ he says, pointing out that the very notion of side effects is just ‘a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’.

Worldwide, one person in nine does not have enough to eat.8 In 2015, six million children under the age of five died, more than half of those deaths due to easy-to-treat conditions such as diarrhoea and malaria.9 Two billion people live on less than $3 a day, and over 70 million young women and men are unable to find work.

There have been extraordinary strides in human well-being over the past 60 years. The average child born on planet Earth in 1950 could expect to live just 48 years; today such a child can look forwards to 71 years of life.6 Since 1990 alone, the number of people living in extreme income poverty — on less than $1.90 a day — has fallen by more than half. Over two billion people have gained access to safe drinking water and toilets for the first time. All this while the human population has grown by almost 40 percent.