Can growth go green? New stripes show the cost of prosperity

Can countries grow richer without harming the planet? A new study introduces a striking novel way to explore this question – through “greening prosperity stripes,” a simple but powerful visual that reveals whether economies are growing cleanly.

Inspired by Professor Ed Hawkins’ iconic climate warming stripes, which use bands of colour to show rising global temperatures, Dr Alexander Mihailov, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Reading, applies a similar idea by blending economics and environmental science. His greening prosperity stripes use global data from the World Bank to track how much ‘prosperity’ each country achieves for every tonne of carbon it emits.

The concept turns two familiar measures into one simple indicator: the Greening Prosperity Ratio (GPR). This is calculated by dividing real GDP per person (a standard measure of economic output and material well-being) by carbon emissions per person. Essentially, the carbon intensity of a country’s economy can be measured by the GPR as value of output per tonne of carbon emissions. The higher the ratio, the more efficiently a nation achieves prosperity with less pollution.

Each year is represented as a vertical stripe, coloured from dark brown (low GPR, carbon-intensive growth) to bright green (high GPR, cleaner growth). The result is a timeline that turns thousands of data points into colourful stripes, letting us see the fragile balance between wealth and carbon at a glance, revealing decades of progress or stagnation.

Dr Mihailov said: “This visualisation method doesn’t claim to replace detailed economic analysis, but to make progress toward net zero easier to grasp and encourage dialogue among the wider public.

“I hope the stripes will be used to show how some strong economies are able to decarbonise while still supporting growth along with the jobs and higher living standards that brings.”

The approach has some limitations, due to absence of publicly available information. Currently the prosperity stripes use GDP and CO₂ data alone, leaving out other greenhouse gases, other measures of prosperity and aspects of imported emissions or income inequality.

Countries with very low emissions can look greener, but remain poorer, and for them the indicator denotes stages of development rather than prosperity. Moreover, a single global prosperity threshold, such as the one proposed recently by the World Bank, cannot capture cultural or regional differences in what counts as prosperity.

Future research could refine the indicator by including wider prosperity and sustainability measures such as health, education or ecological impact, to show not just how green prosperity is, but how fairly it is shared.

The greener the stripe, the cleaner the prosperity

Using global data from 1990 to 2020, the study finds that economies are slowly becoming more carbon-efficient. The stripes show economies turning greener as cleaner technologies take hold, as well as places where growth still depends heavily on fossil fuels.

But the pattern is uneven. Many wealthier countries tend to appear greener, reflecting a shift towards decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions, for example by focussing on services rather than heavy industry and offshoring polluting sectors. Some developing economies are catching up, while energy-exporting and heavily industrialised nations remain browner. And some very poor countries appear deceptively green, not because they are prosperous, but because their emissions are extremely low. Patterns of colour turn decades of global socio-economic change into a story of shifting shades, inviting viewers to ask what drives the difference.

The greening prosperity stripes offer a new representation of the world’s journey towards becoming more sustainable. They are designed to help policymakers, educators and the public see whether economic progress is keeping pace with climate goals and encourage debate about what ‘prosperity’ really means in a warming world.

Dr Mihailov said: “The goal of the greening prosperity stripes is to make the carbon footprint of economies visible in a way that statistics alone cannot.

“As nations strive towards net zero, this new visual tool helps us see the relationship between economic progress and climate change mitigation and explore the possibility of building a world in which we are no longer trading one for the other.”

Reference: Mihailov, A. (2025) Greening prosperity stripes across the globe, Ecological Economics, Volume 241, ISSN 0921-8009, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108818

Image: The greening prosperity stripes for the UK (1990-2020), created by the author.