Last year, I returned to the Irtysh River in eastern Kazakhstan, a place I knew as a child for its vast, powerful current. Back then, the river felt almost oceanic, so wide that cargo ships moved slowly across its surface and the opposite bank seemed like a distant line. The Irtysh is not just a river; it is a lifeline. For centuries, entire villages and cities in Kazakhstan including Pavlodar, Semey and Oskemen, were built along its banks, depending on its water for transport, farming and industry.
Today, those memories feel like stories from another era. The river has narrowed sharply, exposing sandbanks and new islands where deep water once flowed. Fishermen told me they now navigate around stretches that are too shallow for their boats. Standing on the bank, looking at what remained of a river that once shaped whole communities, I felt the unmistakable sense that the land itself was signalling distress, something far larger than one river losing its depth.
That moment captured a broader global reality: the era of believing that “green growth” will save us is coming to an end. For decades, governments promised that economic expansion could continue without exceeding ecological limits, provided it was powered by cleaner technologies. It was an appealing proposition: no need to rethink consumption, development models or expectations of endless expansion. We could keep growing, just more efficiently.
But the evidence no longer supports this comforting narrative. Climate change is accelerating faster than expected. The past five years have been the warmest on record. Extreme heatwaves now push cities across Asia, Europe and North America to the brink of their adaptive capacity. Meanwhile, global wildlife populations have declined by nearly 70% since 1970, and the UN warns that one million species are at risk of extinction. Forests that once stored carbon and created rainfall are degrading under human pressure, and some of the world’s major lakes, including the Great Salt Lake, Lake Urmia and Africa’s Lake Chad, are fading at alarming rates.
This is not the trajectory of a planet where “green growth” is working.
At the heart of the green-growth paradigm lies a simple assumption: that economies can continue expanding while environmental impact declines, thanks to technology and efficiency. The idea is called “decoupling.” Yet absolute global decoupling – the separation of economic activity from material throughput and emissions – has not occurred at any meaningful scale. Renewable energy is surging, but global fossil fuel use continues to rise. Electric vehicles proliferate, but the mining of lithium, nickel and rare earths is tearing into the world’s remaining intact ecosystems. The global economy now consumes more raw materials than at any point in human history – over 100 billion tonnes each year – and only a small fraction is reused.
We have tried to grow our way out of the ecological crisis. Instead, we have grown the crisis.
The problem is not insufficient innovation but the refusal to acknowledge limits. The planet responds to physical pressures, not to GDP targets. It does not recognize policy slogans; it responds to the volume of forests cut, water withdrawn, land ploughed and minerals extracted. A model that requires perpetual expansion cannot be reconciled with a finite Earth.
This is why scientists increasingly argue that the task ahead is not achieving green growth but ensuring ecological survival. That requires a shift from efficiency to resilience – from trying to make growth greener to restoring the systems that make life possible.
A resilience-focused approach rests on three priorities.
First, ecosystem restoration must move to the center of climate policy. Reforesting degraded land, reviving wetlands and protecting watersheds provide carbon storage, cooling and resilience beyond many technological fixes, while delivering strong economic returns.
Second, economies must shift from endless consumption to sufficiency – repairing and reusing resources, reducing waste and curbing luxury emissions – measuring progress through well-being, not extraction.
Finally, governments must prioritize resilience infrastructure: drought-resilient agriculture, modernized irrigation, early-warning systems, climate-resilient health services and cross-border water governance. These are no longer optional but essential lifelines in a rapidly changing climate.
This requires redirecting resources. Governments currently spend trillions subsidising fossil fuels, industrial agriculture and extraction. Redirecting even a modest share toward restoration, resilience and nature-positive development would fundamentally alter our trajectory.
What the Irtysh shows on a small scale, the planet now demonstrates everywhere: ecosystems built over millennia can unravel within decades. When they do, communities, economies and political systems become vulnerable. The collapse of nature is not a future scenario; it is a present reality unfolding in real time.
Green growth was appealing because it suggested that ecological responsibility required no deep changes in how societies operate. But survival in the 21st century demands honesty. The world must restore what it has damaged, reduce what it extracts and rebuild the resilience of both nature and human systems.
The author is Saniya Soltybayeva, a graduate student at the Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Public Policy.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Astana Times.
