Kate Raworth

Hazel Healy: You’ve worked up a blueprint for the world we want to create, one that offers humanity a new ‘compass for prosperity’. Can you explain the concept of Doughnut Economics that lies at the heart of this?

Kate Raworth: The question I seek to answer is: how do we meet the needs of all people within the means of the planet?

My big – but simple – vision is this idea of a doughnut. In the middle, there’s a hole where people are falling short on the essentials of life – food, healthcare, education and housing. The outer ring is the ecological ceiling of resource use: climate change, freshwater stress, biodiversity loss. The doughnut is the ‘safe space’ in between these two (see picture, overleaf).

The University of Leeds has modelled national doughnuts for 150 countries. It shows how a low-income country like Zambia is hardly overshooting any biophysical boundaries but massively falling short on meeting almost all people’s essential needs.

Then you have China, Turkey, Egypt, already overshooting planetary boundaries and still falling short on essential needs. And then you’ve got