On June 4, the World Inequality Lab launched the Global Justice Report: a Plan for Equality and Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries, during the opening of the World Inequality Conference 2026.
The report is available on a dedicated website that also allows to explore the distributional pathways and climate scenarios of the Global Justice Project.
The report sets out a new vision for global progress in the 21st century: grounding human development and equality in planetary habitability. It explores the conditions under which the world could move toward this horizon and traces an economically and ecologically consistent transition path from 2026 to 2100.
Its main conclusion is simple: a global transformation that reconciles planetary habitability and high standards of well-being for all is possible – as long as three conditions are simultaneously met. Fast decarbonization of energy systems is required. But we also need a major shift away from overconsumption towards “sufficiency”. This would involve a sharp reduction in labour hours and raw materials extraction, along with big changes in consumption patterns, food habits, land use and forest cover. Financing and politically sustaining decarbonisation and sufficiency will require a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, both between countries and within them. This reduction of global inequality is compatible with deep decarbonization, indeed, it is a necessary condition for shared prosperity on a finite planet.
The Global Justice Report is the first attempt to propose a fully quantified plan for this transition. It combines four dimensions that today’s debates often treat separately: redistribution at the world scale, a deep reform of the international financial and economic order, a radical transformation of energy systems, and substantial shifts in consumption patterns. Compared with most climate scenarios (including the IPCCs), the main novelty is that we model all four dimensions together and place inequality and sufficiency at the centre of the analysis.
By 2100, the Global Justice Platform aims to:
- Achieve convergence in per capita monthly national income at €5,000 across all countries, closing today’s 16-fold global income gap.
- Increase the bottom half’s share of global wealth from 2% to 30%, while reducing the billionaire class’s share from 6% to 0.05%.
- Enable nearly 90% of the world’s population to double their income while working roughly half of today’s labour hours.
- Limit global warming to 1.8°C through a sustainable convergence pathway combining rapid decarbonisation with a major shift toward sufficiency, including reduced labour hours and material consumption, as well as profound changes in consumption patterns, food systems, land use, and forest cover—compared with more than 4.5°C under current policies.
- Establish a new Global Justice Fund to support massive global investment averaging 10.3% of world GDP annually between 2030 and 2060—compared with less than 0.4% currently allocated to development aid and international organisations. The fund would be financed through a combination of a global wealth tax, a world sovereign wealth fund, and a global income tax targeting the world’s richest individuals.
- Drive a broader transformation and democratisation of the international economic and monetary system.
The report situates itself within a broader international agenda focused on planetary habitability, social justice, and reform of the global financial architecture. It builds on initiatives such as the Bridgetown Initiative, which combines proposals on international monetary reform, global wealth taxation, and climate finance, as well as the recent Sevilla Commitment on development finance, the UN Tax Convention process, and initiatives led by the G20 presidencies of Brazil and South Africa on global inequality and the rebalancing of wealth and power within planetary limits.
MEDIA CONTACT
Alice Fauvel, Communications Manager, World Inequality Lab, alice.fauvel[at]psemail.eu, +33(0)763918168.
