The Doughnut revisited (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last month’s Socialist Standard we discussed Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics. As it happens, on 1 October Raworth and co-author Andrew Fanning published an online paper ‘Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance’ in the journal Nature. This updates and widens the scope of previous work in this framework.

Things have not improved since the original work was done: ‘Billions of people are falling short of meeting their most essential needs, whereas humanity’s ecological imprint on the living planet is now overshooting at least six of the nine planetary boundaries’. Previously four of the boundaries had been crossed, ecological limits which it was essential to keep within.

The boundaries are measured in terms of indicators, with more than one indicator for some boundaries. Ozone-layer depletion has been stable since the early 2000s, but the other indicators for which information over time is available show a worsening of conditions. For instance, four indicators have more than doubled the extent to which they exceed acceptable limits: CO2 concentration and radiative forcing (both of which relate to the climate change boundary), and hazardous chemicals and phosphorus (relating to chemical and nutrient pollution).

The inner ring of the Doughnut deals with meeting people’s needs. Here two indicators have deteriorated significantly, food insecurity and the existence of autocratic regimes. Others have improved, but only slightly, with 10 percent of the world’s population being undernourished in 2021–2, compared to 13 percent in 2000-1. A rapid improvement would be needed to eliminate this problem by 2030. The proportion lacking access to safely managed drinking water only went down from 39 percent to 37 percent over the same period.

Has there been progress overall? Global GDP doubled between 2000 and 2022, but ‘only modest improvements were achieved in reducing social shortfalls worldwide, whereas ecological overshoot increased rapidly, disrupting the critical planetary processes on which all life depends’.

So the Doughnut’s method of examining whether society is coping with meeting everyone’s needs while keeping the planet in a sustainable condition shows very clearly that the present system, capitalism, is unable to meet either goal. A system based on profit cannot solve these problems, and only a change to a world based on production for use will be able to do so.

Paul Bennett