Can the world decarbonise while reducing inequality? Does decarbonisation require a reduction in wealth concentration? Can poverty be eradicated without making growth the precondition for social progress?

Two reports published this spring offer concrete answers.

The first, the Global Justice Report from the World Inequality Lab, is the result of work by 45 contributors, coordinated among others by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, and draws on databases compiled by more than 200 researchers. It offers one of the most detailed quantitative projections so far of a world that is both just and within planetary boundaries.

The year 2100 described in the report looks radically different from today’s world. Global warming would be held to around 1.8°C, rather than the more than 4°C implied by current policies. Nearly 90% of the world’s population would see their income double, with average monthly income per person converging towards €5,000 in every country, while working roughly half as many hours, from about 2,100 to 1,000 hours a year. The share of global wealth held by the poorest half of humanity would rise from 2% to 30%, while the share held by billionaires would fall from 6% to 0.05%. To get there, the report proposes the establishment of a Global Justice Fund whose annual expenditures (country dividends and investment flows) would average 10% of world GDP a year between 2030 and 2060. This instrument would be funded by an annual global wealth tax of up to 20% on billionaire fortunes, as well as income-tax rates of up to 90% on the richest 1%. Moreover, a World Sovereign Fund would accumulate a portfolio of sustainable assets worth around 60% of world GDP, and country dividends would be distributed on an equal per-capita basis and linked to climate, education, health and inequality targets.

The second report, the Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth, was developed under the mandate of UN Special Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter and presented at the International Labour Organization in Geneva in April. It starts from a stark diagnosis: as of April 2026, around 826 million people were still living in extreme poverty. At the higher poverty threshold of USD 8.30 a day, around 3.7 billion people remain deprived, and the absolute number below this threshold has changed little over the past three decades. Growth has not delivered poverty eradication.

Co-built over eighteen months with more than 400 contributors from trade unions, UN agencies, governments, academia and civil society, the Roadmap assembles a catalogue of 80 concrete policy measures to reduce poverty and inequality while loosening the economy’s dependence on growth, at both national and international levels. The proposals are organised around six pillars: transforming economic systems; strengthening labour rights, care and economic democracy; expanding universal basic services and social protection; advancing ecological justice; transforming the international economic order; and deepening democratic planning and governance. The report argues that countries should prevent poverty rather than treat it, by investing in housing, health, education and nutrition. Instead of fixing unfair market outcomes after they happen, it seeks to make markets fairer from the start, for instance through public procurement, the social and solidarity economy, and the decommodification of essential goods.

Read together, the two reports make a deceptively simple argument: a more equal and liveable world is materially possible. The thread running through them is that none of this requires growth: universal wellbeing within planetary limits is a question of how resources are distributed and what they are spent on, not of producing ever more. They also rebut a recurring conservative claim: that climate change is ultimately a problem of demography, with too many people for a finite planet. It is not. These reports show that high wellbeing for all – even with projected global demographic changes – can be reconciled with planetary boundaries, provided decarbonisation, sufficiency and inequality reduction advance together.

The deeper story concerns unequal access to wealth, energy, assets and power, as the concentration of wealth is also a concentration of climate responsibility. Chancel and Rehm (2026) find that, in 2022, the global top 1% was linked to 41% of private ownership-based emissions and the global top 10% to 77%. The same logic applies in Belgium. Apostel and O’Neill estimate that the richest 1% in Belgium alone hold around 24% of the country’s net wealth and, according to the World Inequality Lab database, the richest 1% in Belgium have a carbon footprint more than 20 times higher than the poorest 10%.

A second false opposition sets sufficiency measures against green investment, when in fact the two work together. In Belgium, estimates put the additional annual green investment needed to reach net zero by 2050 at up to €25 billion per year. Where the transition leans more heavily on sufficiency – fewer private vehicles, fewer square metres of new construction, more modal shift and lower energy demand – that figure falls to around €11 billion per year.

The question that remains open is the one of political agency. Both reports rely on forms of international cooperation that are increasingly fragile – global taxation, stronger multilateral institutions, reforms of the international economic order, democratic planning and long-term public investment – and they appear at a moment in time marked by nationalism and the rise of the far right, when the organised labour, social conflict, political crises and institutional openings that delivered the redistributive advances of the twentieth century are all weakened, leaving a gap between the instruments the reports prescribe and the political clout needed to wield them 

What these reports nonetheless establish is that rapid decarbonisation, sufficiency, green and social public investment and the fight against inequality are four dimensions of the same struggle, not rival agendas. The question is no longer whether such a world is materially possible, but which social and political forces could make it real and how to make it happen in the current context.