Global Justice Report

The Global Justice Report attempts to set out a new vision for global progress in the 21^st century: grounding human development and equality in planetary habitability. It explores the conditions under which the world could move toward this horizon and traces an economically and ecologically consistent transition path from 2026 to 2100.

Its main conclusion is simple: it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all, but only if the transformation rests on three pillars simultaneously. Fast decarbonization of energy systems is necessary. But we also need a major shift toward sufficiency – understood as a sharp reduction in labour hours and material footprint and large changes in consumption patterns, food habits, land use, and forest cover. In addition, neither decarbonization nor sufficiency can be financed and politically sustained without a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, both between countries and within them. The compression of global inequality is not only compatible with deep decarbonization; it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.

The Global Justice Report is the first attempt to propose a fully quantified plan going in this direction, combining four dimensions that today's debates often treat separately: redistribution at the world scale, a deep reform of the international financial and economic order, a radical transformation of energy systems, and substantial shifts in consumption patterns. to most climate scenarios, including by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main novelty is we model all four dimensions together and place inequality and sufficiency at the center of the analysis.

Concretely: Per capita monthly national income converges to €5,000 in every country, closing a 16-fold gap. The share of the bottom half of global wealth increases from 2% to 30%, while the share of the billionaire class decreases from 6% to 0.05%. Nearly 90% of the world’s population double their income while working roughly half as many hours as they do today. Warming reaches 1.8°C by 2100, rather than over 4°C under baseline macroeconomic and policy trends.

The Global Justice Report is part of a broader international agenda for planetary habitability, social justice, and reform of the global financial architecture – including the Bridgetown Initiative launched by Barbados in 2022, combining international monetary reform, global wealth taxation, and climate finance; the recent Sevilla Commitment on development finance; the UN Tax Convention process; and G20 initiatives led by Brazil and South Africa on global inequality and the rebalancing of wealth and power within planetary limits. The main contribution of this report is to place these proposals within a quantified institutional framework, modelling socioeconomic convergence, temperature change, and distributional trajectories through 2100. Our broad conclusion is that it is possible to conceive of a quantitatively consistent plan for sustainable development on a global scale based on proposals such as the Bridgetown Initiative and other recent platforms.