Reframing Sustainability in an Age of Polycrisis: Economic Models, Indicators, and a New Integrated Baseline for EU Governance

The author examines how sustainability should be reframed in the context of polycrisis. Focusing on the European Union, the article compares green growth, ecological economics, and post-growth approaches and assesses four major sustainability indicator families: the Sustainable Development Goals Index, Human Development Index, Ecological Footprint, and welfare-adjusted measures such as the Genuine Progress Indicator and Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. It finds that while each captures important dimensions of sustainability, none adequately represents the ecological limits, social inequalities, cross-domain feedbacks, and systemic risks characteristic of polycrisis. The author proposes developing an integrated sustainability baseline, potentially expressed as a single “magic number” comparable in communicative power to gross domestic product, that combines social foundations, ecological ceilings, externalities, and systemic risk while remaining transparent, adaptable across governance levels, and democratically legitimate.