Sophie Seiser
Author
Dear Chancellor Stocker,
Your party is currently negotiating key topics for the next legislative period. In the past, your decisions have failed to adequately address the urgency of climate change. Hence, I urge you to stop making climate-blind policies that jeopardize our future. The Climate Crisis is no longer a distant, abstract threat. It is here, tangible and drastically accelerating, ignoring it is highly irresponsible.
Surface temperatures have risen faster in the (external link)past five decades than ever before in human history. The frequency and intensity of heat (external link)waves, floods, droughts and wildfires is unprecedented (external link). Austria is not immune, (external link)its temperature is rising faster than the global average, glaciers are disappearing and (external link)permafrost is melting (external link). The costs of climate inaction already (external link)amounting to €7 billion annually and will increase dramatically due to growing (external link)frequencies of devastating extreme weather events and potential EU penalties if Austria fails to meet its (external link)climate targets (external link)
The question is therefore not whether we should act, but how.
Our growth-obsessed, market-driven economy is the result of specific economic ideas and strategic policy interventions, it is neither natural nor inevitable. It reduces people from (external link)citizens to consumers, prioritizing profit over human and planetary well-being (external link). This system has been constructed, and therefore, it can also be reconstructed and rebuilt into a system centred around sufficiency.
Sufficiency is not about deprivation, but about smarter, more sustainable policies that protect us from deprivation and scarcity. It is a framework that aligns our economic and social institutions with wellbeing and the planetary boundaries. Its core principle is ‘enough’, (external link)ensuring that everyone can live a good life within our ecological limits, while embracing the idea of (external link)“living well on less” (external link). Sufficiency (external link)challenges our current, neoliberal, (external link)consumer-driven understanding of prosperity, (external link) replacing (external link)quantity with quality and excess with balance (external link).
Public policy is a critical starting point as it plays a significant role in incentivizing overconsumption and ecological degradation through subsidizing fossil fuels, factory farming and unsustainable infrastructure. Tax money is currently being used to undermine (external link)the foundations of our future (external link). Sufficiency-oriented policies (external link)can reverse this trend by redirecting resources to meaningful social institutions, including (external link)health, care, education and healthy ecosystems (external link).
Sufficiency is not an unrealistic, utopian ideology, but a strategic policy framework, a compass guiding us toward stability and prosperity in a resource-constrained world. What does sufficiency look like in practice? It is simple: set upper limits on per person living space in new buildings, introduce heating and cooling thresholds, stop the expansion of carbon-intensive infrastructure, halt the expansion of urban sprawl. Ban advertisements for high-emission goods such as SUVs or fast fashion. Regulate messaging that promotes planetary and societal harm. Ending long-overdue fossil (external link)fuel (external link) subsidies and shift toward a local, plant-based food system (external link).
As a high-ranking policymaker, you are in a unique, powerful position to initiate this shift and show the world what sustainable, progressive and responsible leadership looks like. The question is: Will Austria take the lead or fall behind?
The time to act is now.