IDN Position Paper for COP31 Degrowth for Climate Justice and a Livable Planet

The decade following the adoption of the Paris Agreement has proven that an approach built on "green growth" and technological efficiency is incapable of halting ecological breakdown. Scientific evidence is unambiguous: absolute decoupling of aggregate GDP growth from environmental degradation and emissions does not exist at a global scale and remains a myth used to legitimize the status quo. If Global North nations insist on growing GDP, it would take over 200 years to reach net-zero emissions.

The host region of COP31, the Mediterranean (Antalya), directly faces the dramatic impacts of the climate crisis: worsening water scarcity, drought-induced agricultural stress, and intensifying geopolitical tensions. Yet, current UNFCCC negotiations remain captured by fossil fuel lobbyists and corporate diplomacy. This is not an implementation error, but a structural flaw: on a finite planet, infinite economic growth is a physical impossibility.

Policy Diagnosis

The New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) and current climate finance architectures rely heavily on mobilizing private capital (de-risking) and financial leverage. This approach mandates a positive return on investment (ROI), legally and economically chaining climate policy to continuous aggregate GDP growth.

Systemic Root Cause

This structure functions as a modern form of green colonialism. It masks the reality that the Global North annually appropriates over $10 trillion worth of resources and underpaid labor from the Global South through unequal exchange. Furthermore, international climate negotiations systematically ignore emissions from the military-industrial complex in IPCC accounting, even as Global North militarization serves precisely to protect this imperial mode of living and resource extraction.

Degrowth Alternative

1. De-financialized Public Finance: Replace profit-driven private capital with direct, debt-free ecological reparations to the Global South, funded through progressive wealth taxes in the Global North.
2. Debt Cancellation: Complete cancellation of Global South sovereign debt to enable economic delinking from extractivist export imperatives.
3. Demilitarization & Redirection of Military Budgets: Drastic reductions in military spending and its redirection to international climate funds, alongside mandatory inclusion of military emissions in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
4. Socialization of Investment: Socialize decisions on investment following democratic processes through sectoral and coordination boards at multiple levels, based on the subsidiarity principle (decisions are taken at the lowest possible level, based on their domain).

Policy Diagnosis

Targets to triple renewable energy capacity (COP28) mandate absolute capacity expansion without establishing binding mechanisms for the active phase-out of fossil fuels. As a result, efficiency gains are swiftly absorbed by aggregate economic growth (Jevons paradox), rendering renewables an addition to, rather than a replacement of, fossil energy.

Systemic Root Cause

Market-based climate policies convert essential survival infrastructure and lifelines-energy, housing, water, and food-into instruments of private capital accumulation and enclosure.

Degrowth Alternative

1. Universal Basic Services (UBS): Full decommodification and public/common ownership of energy grids, water supply, and housing. Energy must be treated as a public good and human right, not a commodity.
2. Energy Commons & Sufficiency: Absolute reduction of energy throughput in the Global North, paired with public and community-owned energy systems (energy commons).
3. Agroecological Transition & Water Sovereignty: Shift away from corporate agro-business and technocratic engineering toward localized agroecological food systems and community water management (Water Commons), securing food and water sovereignty in vulnerable regions like the Mediterranean.
4. Universal Care Income as a transitional policy: A universal cash transfer adjusted to the cost of living during the process of economic decommodification.

Policy Diagnosis

Current climate policies rely on GDP-driven employment models that lock workers into high-throughput, carbon-intensive sectors, failing to foster human well-being or genuine social security.

Systemic Root Cause

The capitalist ruling class has captured political decision-making to preserve the "imperial mode of living" enjoyed by elites in the Global North. This system relies on competition and alienated wage labor, preventing democratic control over what, how, and for whom society produces.

Degrowth Alternative

1. Shorter Working Week: A substantial reduction in paid wage labor time (e.g., a 4-day work week) to decrease production throughput, redistribute care work equitably, and expand free time.
2. Job Guarantee: State-backed, meaningful, and sustainable employment guarantees in ecological restoration, care work, and social infrastructure, decoupling livelihoods from corporate profit cycles and GDP growth.
3. Labor market restructuring: Training programs to help workers from the most polluting industries transition into socially useful jobs. Massive educational programs to guide young people toward these jobs. Divestment from AI and its supply chain.
4. Wealth Caps & Resource Convergence: Strict progressive wealth and income taxation, alongside global resource caps that mandate absolute energy and resource convergence between North and South.

COP31 cannot remain another marketplace for carbon offsets and corporate greenwashing. The ecological crisis is not a technical or financing glitch, but the direct outcome of a global capitalist growth system.

Climate justice requires clear role differentiation:

• For the Global North: Planned, democratic downscaling (Degrowth) to restore ecological balance and dismantle colonial resource drain.
• For the Global South: Autonomy and reorientation away from extractivist trade dependencies (Delinking - Samir Amin) to achieve food, energy, and knowledge sovereignty.

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We urge the COP Presidency and negotiation delegates to move beyond failed green growth dogmas and embed a planned post-growth transition into the official UNFCCC climate agenda.