Triple Bottom Line or Trilemma? Global Tradeoffs Between Prosperity, Inequality, and the Environment
研究分析了1995至2017年间59个国家的动态轨迹和140个国家的静态数据，发现没有一个国家同时实现高繁荣、低不平等和低环境影响，揭示出三者之间存在普遍权衡，尤其繁荣与环境难以兼得。
A key aim of sustainable development is the joint achievement of prosperity, equality, and environmental integrity: in other words, material living standards that are high, broadly-distributed, and low-impact. This has often been called the “triple bottom line”. But instead, what if there is a “trilemma” that inhibits the simultaneous achievement of these three goals? We analysed international patterns and trends in the relationships between per-capita gross national income, the Gini coefficient for income distribution, and per-capita ecological footprint from 1995 to 2017, benchmarking them against thresholds from the existing literature. A “dynamic” analysis of the trajectories of 59 countries and a “static” analysis of a larger sample of 140 countries found that none met the triple bottom line, and that instead there were widespread tradeoffs among the three indicators. These tradeoffs, leading to divergent national trajectories and country clusters, show that common pair-wise explanations such as Kuznets Curves do not adequately capture important development dynamics. In particular, while only a few countries simultaneously met the thresholds for prosperity and equality on the one hand and equality and environment on the other, none did for prosperity and environment. Moreover, inequality likely makes resolving this critical tradeoff more difficult. Our findings suggest that mitigating the sustainability trilemma may require countries – especially those that are already prosperous – to prioritize economic redistribution and environmental stewardship over further growth.