A group of more than 40 researchers spent 20 months devising a plan for the world to achieve ecological sustainability within planetary boundaries, all while seeing incomes rise for 98% of the global population and reducing working hours for everybody by half to two and a half days a week. The plan to achieve this by 2100 is laid out in the recent "Global Justice Report." If it sounds utopian, Lucas Chancel, the co-director of the World Inequality Lab and editor of the report, is the first person to acknowledge this, but explains why it's not only possible — there's even historical precedent for many of the measures the report outlines. Achieving this plan rests on three pillars: decarbonization and the energy transition; a shift towards "sufficiency," defined here as the reduction of labor and production of superfluous products not needed for human survival; and a "drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power." "Basically, our plan is thought in a way that it can work with [an] incomplete coalition of actors," he says. "That is, you can start to implement it even though you don't have a global wealth tax. But our argument is that progressively, more and more countries [are] doing exactly these things." Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast here. Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky. Cover image: Bay near Pulau Rayo, Raja Ampat, Indonesia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay. —— Timecodes

A habitable, equitable world is possible

How we accomplish it

Rebutting the arguments against it

98% of the world would see their income rise