British economist Nicholas Stern famously said that ‘climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen’. But still, leading economists and policy-makers are looking for big answers in the same broken marketplace. Let us be clear: the global financial crash and climate change are inter-related crises. They are linked by the way we have pursued economic growth. Now, the world has to search for new economic models.
Will the answer lie in the activism of the poor, who are dependent on the environment for their survival, or will it lie in the prescriptions of the consuming middle classes? Movements of the poor and dispossessed are demanding more than simple technological changes to fulfil their needs. They want hard and uncomfortable issues surrounding their access to natural resources to be resolved; they want equity and justice to be the bedrock of the climate movement of the future.
