We may pine for the Nordic Model, but it's as bad as anyone else for toxic consumption. Here's how to update it
The Nordic flags - left to right, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden,Finland
Again, as this UK General Election grinds on, and particularly for those us who think this is indeed the “climate election”, we may be tempted to pine for other political and economic systems doing so much better than ours, in terms of balanced government and wise-decision making.
Tempting indeed to look at the Nordic model - we have often explored it here - as an example of best practice.
Maybe so, in terms of everyday quality of life. But here’s a counterintuitive - but expectedly well-researched - article from green economist Jason Hickel, published in Al-Jazeera. Jason suggests that the Nordic societies are actually some of the most polluting on the planet:
The Nordic countries have some of the highest levels of resource use and CO2 emissions in the world, in consumption-based terms, drastically overshooting safe planetary boundaries.
Ecologists say that a sustainable level of resource use is about 7 tonnes of material stuff per person per year. Scandinavians consume on average more than 32 tonnes per year. That is four and a half times over the sustainable level, similar to the United States, driven by overconsumption of everything from meat to cars to plastic.
As for emissions, the Nordic countries perform worse than the rest of Europe, and only marginally better than the world's most egregious offenders - the US, Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia. Yes, they generate more renewable energy than most countries, but these gains are wiped out by carbon-intensive imports.
This is why the Nordic countries fall toward the very bottom of the Sustainable Development Index. We think of these nations as progressive, but in fact, their performance has worsened over time. Sweden, for example, has gone from 0.755 on the index in the 1990s down to 0.328 today, plunging from the top seven to number 143.
For decades we have been told that nations should aspire to develop towards the Nordic countries. But in an era of ecological breakdown, this no longer makes sense. If everyone in the world consumed like Scandinavians, we would need nearly five Earths to sustain us.
This kind of overconsumption is driving a global crisis of habitat destruction, species extinction and climate change. You will not see much evidence of this in Norway or Finland, but that is because, as with most rich nations, the bulk of their ecological impact has been outsourced to the global South. That is where most of the resource extraction happens, and where global warming bites hardest. The violence hits elsewhere.
Of course, Scandinavia is not alone in this. Many high-income countries pose just as much of a problem. But as we wake up to the realities of ecological breakdown, it becomes clear that the Nordic countries no longer offer the promise that we once thought they did.
It is time to update the Nordic model for the Anthropocene. Nordic countries have it right when it comes to public healthcare, education and progressive social democracy, but they need to dramatically reduce their consumption if they are to stand as a beacon for the rest of the world in the 21st century
Suggestions that Jason makes for the Nordic update include:
Reducing material footprint by nearly 70%, by scaling down fossil fuels, going plant-based in diets, retrofitting old buildings rather than build new ones, making consumer object last longer and be repairable, improving public transportation. Both Norway and Finland have recent come out with serious plans for what’s called “ecological reconstruction”.
Abandon GDP as a measure of progress - as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern recently pledged to do - and focus instead on human well-being and ecology. There is a strong scientific consensus forming around this approach. A new paper signed by more than 11,000 scientists argues that high-income nations must shift to post-growth economic models if we are going to have any chance of preventing climate breakdown.
Follow new research findings that show how it’s not feasible for high-income nations to reduce their resource use and emissions fast enough to get down to sustainable levels - while at the same time pursuing economic growth.