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SYPS: Symposium Physics of Sustainability and Human-Nature Interactions

SYPS 1: Physics of Sustainability and Human-Nature Interactions

SYPS 1.5: Hauptvortrag

Mittwoch, 18. März 2015, 11:45–12:15, H 0105

Ecological econophysics for degrowth — •Salvador Pueyo — Dept. d'Ecologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain — Research & Degrowth, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Climate change, resource scarcity and ecosystem degradation suggest that we have already overshot the sustainable level of economic throughput. One of the greatest challenges of our time is to move from a growth-based economy to a socially benign degrowth. The obstacles ahead are not only political and cultural but also technical: How to transform the economic system in depth without undesired emergent properties or loss of its basic functionality? How to shrink the economy without triggering uncontrolled recessions? How to effectively increase equality to compensate for a decreasing average consumption? Several of the involved features are best expressed as frequency distributions (of recession sizes, of individual income or resource consumption), thus demanding the kind of approach used in statistical physics, which links distributions to mechanisms. This econophysical approach should be combined with that of ecological economics, which treats the economy as a subsystem of the biosphere instead of an autonomous system. Researchers in econophysics or complexity economics are in a unique position to move beyond more mundane goals and apply their knowledge to help changing the system in favor of sustainability, equality and democracy while we still have the opportunity.