Climate emergency and sustainable growth: a way forward for economics as a discipline

Abstract Addressing the economics of climate change requires a systemic approach, integrating insights from the natural and social sciences. In the face of environmental catastrophes that are causing massive migration and invaluable losses, economists are finding themselves ill-equipped to play their part. The climate crisis is undermining the basis of traditional economic growth models and providing a new impetus to revise economic theory. This paper explores how the economic world operates as an open system, in which uncertainty and multiple potential processes dominate economic events. It proposes that the coherent set of concepts and tools introduced by quantum theory is well suited to interpreting the dynamics of economic processes. Ultimately, the climate crisis is forcing us to question the primacy of market laws, which are ubiquitous in economic theory. The inevitable outcome of this trajectory should be the cross-fertilisation between different perspectives from the East, West, and “Global South”.