The Donut Economy Comes to Barcelona

On July 29, we hit the annual limit of Earth’s ability to bear the load that the human race generates. Thursday, July 29 was Earth Overcapacity Day (Earth Crossing Day) from the year 2021. From now until the end of the year, we are already living at the expense of future generations who will have to suffer from our actions. This is an account developed by Global Footprint Network. It is a global account and if we look at it by country, we will find that Qatar ends the year on February 9; Luxembourg at 15; United States, March 14, as Canada; Spain, May 25. In 2010 the world date arrived one month later and in 1990 on December 7. This type of calculation has been made and disclosed for years, with various goals. We need to analyze what we are doing to change it. We need to spread and raise awareness. These numbers are very worrying. It is proved that we would need two and a half planets if everyone lived as in Spain. It would be 5 if we did it like us.

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On the same day of overcapacity on the ground, the Barcelona City Council made an announcement: It will analyze the reality of the city from the economy proposal Donuts. The press conference doesn’t seem to get much attention, and it can be followed live on YouTube and closed down without questions. but economy Donuts It is based on a fundamental change in the pillars and prevailing ideas of the economy and the thinking of our societies. Economie Donuts He confronts us with what it means to thrive in the twenty-first century.

At the Círculo de Economía days in June, marked by amnesty in the media, Mayor Colau really wanted to make it clear that the economy had to be sustainable in order for it to be considered progress. There is scientific consensus on the environmental crisis we are going through, but there is no consensus in the economic world on sustainability. There is little consensus that in most economics schools, their students leave without studying anything relevant. There are a few exceptions, one of them is Enrique Tello and his group from the University of Barcelona, who promoted the project to be developed from Barcelona.

Kate Raworth, an economist and professor at Oxford University, associated with Oxfam, the United Nations Development Programme, is behind the proposal for an economics Donuts, translated into Spanish his work as Donut Economy (Bedus 2018). An author and some ideas that have not stopped growing in recent years and that are related to a new common sense under construction, although the previous idea is still dominant. Economie Donuts He has a very clear proposition: prosperity in the twenty-first century involves satisfying social needs within ecological limits, and that has little to do with the idea of economic growth that has come to dominate and dominate. We cannot transcend environmental limits (climate change, pollution, ocean acidification…) as we are doing now, nor can we fail to meet the needs of the inhabitants of our societies (food, health, education, income, work, housing., gender equality, social equality…). Hence the idea came Donuts. the Donuts Health is the goal, we need our societies not to fall through the central hole by not being able to meet their needs and cannot go beyond the outer limit Donuts As we do and we reach the environmental crisis.

It remains to be seen what will emerge from this agreement and this project involving Barcelona City Council, the Tello Group and the Raworth Donut Economics Action Laboratory. The goal is for Barcelona, as Amsterdam recently did, to analyze the city’s position in terms of its social deficits and planetary boundaries. You must diagnose Donuts For Barcelona in what we drop through the central hole and in what we cross the border. The work developed and the results obtained must be put to the service of the city to identify scenarios that collectively allow for progress in prosperity that cannot exist without the consolidation of social and environmental needs. Something that has not yet been done, in this city and not in others. There is no progress and no growth that does not meet the needs of life on this planet.