On February 9, the Swiss will vote on the “environmental responsibility” initiative. The text requires the economy to respect the planet’s limits.
By May 27, Switzerland had already consumed its 2024 share of resources that the planet is able to regenerate. This date marked its annual “Overshoot Day”, meaning if every person on the planet lived as the Swiss did this year, humanity would need 2.5 Earths to survive long-term.
To protect the planet, the youth wing of the left-wing Green Party wants Switzerland to make its “Overshoot Day” a thing of the past. In February 2023, the young Greens submitted the popular initiative “For a responsible economy that respects planetary boundaries”. The text sets a deadline of ten years to achieve this objective but does not propose any concrete measures.
The concept of planetary boundaries was proposed in 2009 by the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. It defines nine limits that must be observed to preserve healthy ecosystems. The initiative focuses on six of these boundaries: climate change, loss of biodiversity, water consumption, land use, nitrogen emissions and phosphorous emissions.
The initiative is backed by a broad alliance of left-wing parties and NGOs; it is opposed by the government, parliament, business circles, and right-wing and centrist parties. The opposition believes that the Young Greens’ text threatens the country’s prosperity and that the laws in force in Switzerland are sufficient.
Edited by Samuel Jaberg / translated from French using DeepL/ amva
