What is the level of development that the Global South can sustainably aspire to? We argue that positioning Nordic countries as the leaders of "sustainable development", as is often done, poses a serious dilemma: international adoption of their lifestyles risks severely breaching planetary biophysical limits, while non-adoption risks perpetuating developmental inequality. We introduce a revised conceptual framework for "sustainable development" emphasising scalability as a pivotal facet. Our results highlight Panama, Costa Rica, and Sri Lanka as having achieved high levels of social progress with low environmental pressures, representing a more realistic aspiration for the rest of humanity.
Dr. Chirag Dhara's research interests bridge climate science and "sustainable development." His work focuses on two interconnected challenges: enhancing global and Indian monsoon projections in response to changing aerosols, and developing frameworks to evaluate environmental performance within the constraints of equity and biophysical boundaries.Chirag is a quantum physicist turned sustainability scientist with two doctorates: one in Earth System Science (2017) from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Germany, and the other in Photonics (2013) from the Institute of Photonic Sciences, Barcelona, Spain.He co-authored India's first comprehensive climate change assessment report released by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, MoES, Pune in 2020. He was a contributing author to the IPCC AR6's Atlas (2021).