Economic growth plays a critical role in raising living standards and enabling human progress. However, economic growth needs to decouple from negative environmental consequences, as these, in turn, degrade the very foundations of human development. One example of a negative environmental consequence is airborne emissions that lead to climate change and air pollution. To meet any emissions reduction target, the minimum requirement is that economic growth decouples from emissions growth. Hence, at best, emissions would be reduced from year to year, at a steady pace, even if the economy grows—a process called absolute decoupling. At second-best, the growth rate of the economy would outpace the growth rate of emissions—a process called relative decoupling.

The Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) is the only region in the world where greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are not decoupling from income growth. The decoupling processes can be visualized as is done in Figure 1 for a world average as well as for Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and MENA. It plots the growth of gross national income (GNI, blue line) and carbon emissions (red line), both in per capita terms, from 1990 to 2018 for an average resident of the world, ECA, and MENA. Globally (left panel of Figure 1), relative decoupling was achieved with average incomes rising faster than per capita carbon emissions, even though emissions were still increasing over this period. In ECA (middle panel of Figure 1), absolute decoupling was achieved, with average carbon emissions per capita decreasing by around 30 percent compared to their 1990 levels. In a forthcoming report, “Blue Skies, Blue Seas in the Middle East and North Africa,” we show that North America also achieved absolute decoupling, while other regions of the world (including East Asia and Pacific, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean) managed to decouple income growth from carbon emissions relatively. In stark contrast, MENA (right panel of Figure 1) is the only region, in which growth of CO2 emissions per capita has outpaced the growth of average incomes, making it the only region that hasn’t decoupled in some form.

Read the full article about decoupling income growth from emissions by Martin Philipp Heger and Lukas Vashold at Brookings.