In 2012, twenty-one past winners of the Blue Planet Prize — awarded for research that improves the global environment — released a landmark report. It stated that “in the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization.”

A year later, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Kevin Anderson, went one step further, arguing that “revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” would be needed to prevent the planet warming by more than 2°C.

More recently, in 2019, scientists from fifty nations demanded “bold and drastic” changes to the economy, including a shift away from GDP growth toward “sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being.” This year, a paper coauthored by seventeen scientists called for “fundamental changes to global capitalism, education, and equality, which include inter alia the abolition of perpetual economic growth.”