Economic growth is inconsistent with sustainable development when it results in the net reduction of the portfolio of assets which includes: natural assets, comprising resource assets (biological resources, agricultural land, geological resources) and environmental assets (ecological processes and biological diversity, including species and places that are valued aesthetically or for their own sake); manufactured assets (technology, buildings, equipment, infrastructure); and human assets (knowledge, skills).
For thousands of years and well into early modern times, world economies saw no growth at all, but from around the mid-19th century and again since the mid-20th century, the real GDP has increased at an enormous speed, and so has human consumption. In the Middle Ages, households in Central Europe might have owned fewer than 30 objects in average; in 1900, this number had increased to 400, and in 2020 to 15,000.
The UN defines uneconomic growth as:
Economic development is unsustainable when it increases vulnerability to crises. For example: a drought may force farmers to slaughter animals needed to sustain production in future years; a drop in prices may cause farmers or other producers to over-exploit natural resources to maintain incomes.
The annual increase in industrial production in 1989 was as large as that of Europe's total production in the 1930s. A global economy growing at 2-3% per year implies a quadrupling of industrial output in the same period so that a fourfold increase in environmental performance is necessary just to maintain current environment impacts – which scientific evidence already indicates as portending future disasters.
To allow maximization of economic growth to be the overwhelming determinant of development is to guarantee that mostly inappropriate development will result. To conceive of development as indiscriminate economic growth is to favour the wealthy, since their fundamental interest lies in maximizing the amount of return on investment without having to be concerned whether capital ought to be invested more appropriately, whether or not it is profitable. Growth means quantitatively more. Development means qualitatively better. The two are not the same and may indeed be inversely related.
When it comes to practicalities, economic "recovery" programmes never seem to differentiate between environmentally sound investments and recovery based on greater energy use, increased car sales, more intensive agriculture or any of the other myriad practices that are causing environmental problems.
We cannot allow the Gross National Product to destroy the Gross Natural Product any further. Conserving and recreating nature must become our highest priority.
Environmentally malign economic growth hurts the poor first and hardest. The gap between what urgently needs to be done and the policies still being pursued is now so vast as to threaten the legitimacy of the entire political system.
The continued quest for economic growth as the organizing principle of public policy is accelerating the breakdown of the ecosystem's regenerative capacities and the social fabric that sustains human community. This intensifies competition for resources between rich and poor. This shifts power away from governments responsible for the public good toward a limited number of corporations and financial institutions driven by a single imperative, namely the quest for financial gain.
If China were to consume resources at the level of South Korea or Taiwan and import crude oil and grain at rates comparable to those of other rapidly growing East Asian economies, it would need more energy and more cereals than are currently available on the world market.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist (Kenneth Boulding).
Business requires growth because it results in larger markets. Governments favour it because it results in a larger tax base. Growth is favoured by socialists because it makes redistribution easier. People in a consumer society like growth because well-being has been redefined as well-having, namely having more.
Economic growth provides the conditions in which protection of the environment can best be achieved. "Low growth" strategies make society worse off than it might otherwise have been.