Tony Juniper on tackling the inequality at the root of the climate and nature crisis

29 June 2025

The veteran environmentalist and author joins Planet Possible host Niki Roach to talk about his new book, Just Earth

For Tony Juniper CBE, the climate and nature emergencies are merely symptoms of a much deeper societal malaise: global inequality. In his new book, Just Earth: How a Fairer World Will Save the Planet, the renowned environmentalist, campaigner and author shares his vision for creating the fairness that will enable lasting change.

Juniper joins Niki Roach on this month’s Planet Possible podcast to discuss Just Earth, the state of nature both globally and in the UK, and what he thinks about the media coverage surrounding the topic. Drawing on Juniper’s experience as chair of Natural England (a role for which he was recently reappointed for a second term), as well as his time at WWF and the Wildlife Trusts, they explore how nature recovery fits into the wider context of economic growth and whether there has to be a trade off between the two.

If you enjoy this taster, you can listen to the full conversation here or search for Planet Possible in your favourite podcast app. Follow the podcast to stay updated on our monthly deep dives into pressing environmental challenges.

Now, over to Niki and Tony…

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Niki Roach: Here in the UK the government is really focused on economic growth. Does there have to be a trade off between economic growth and environmental recovery?

Tony Juniper: This is one of the big problems that we have faced down the decades as we've set environmental targets of different kinds, both globally and nationally – and most of them have not been met. It's really striking the distance between what has been set out based on science, and then what we've managed to achieve.

Part of the challenge comes down to this notion of trade offs: if we have a choice between nature and the economy, what's more important? The economy is going to generate jobs, it's going to improve incomes, it's going to help to sustain good living conditions for people. Therefore nature becomes an inevitable, albeit regrettable price of progress. That's the tradeoff mindset, whereas if you adopt a mindset of synergies, you might say, instead, that nature is underpinning all of the economic and social wellbeing that we enjoy.

This is quite a fundamental difference between how we look at things now compared to how we might be looking at things if we're going to solve these environmental problems: seeing nature as a prerequisite and an enabler of economic development and growth. We now need to reflect that into policies and the way in which we conduct ourselves, if we're going to be able to achieve outcomes that are, for example, leading to more houses being built at the same time as making sure there are more birds and insects in the environment.

That is something which we have the know how to do, but which we need to achieve a political consensus around, and to have people's backing from local communities through to private sector boardrooms to be able to do. One of the reasons why I wrote Just Earth was to reveal some of these connections between a healthy society and a healthy economy and a healthy and recovering natural environment. Putting them together is really the big job of the 21st century.

NR: You write in the book about inequality, about the fact that in 2019, the world’s 2,153 billionaires controlled more wealth between them than the poorest 4.6 billion people, more than half the global population. Where does inequality fit in with solving the global and local challenges of nature depletion and global heating?

TJ: Social inequalities of different kinds – wealth, gender, race, intergenerational, those who enjoy particular privilege and those who suffer the consequence – is right at the heart of the environmental conundrum. You can see this in different ways and perhaps the simplest is to note that as the greenhouse gasses are building up in the atmosphere, the people who are putting it there are doing so very unequally. A tiny proportion (around 10 per cent) is coming from the world's poorest, half of it is coming from the richest 10 per cent of people.

This invites questions around lifting people out of poverty. We can't have everybody consuming at the level of the richest as they emerge from poverty. Greenhouse gasses is one example of that, but it also applies to resources that are in consumer goods and also land and water. That disproportionate level of consumption is one of the biggest inequalities that blocks progress, because the rich and the better off globally have been, let's put it mildly, reluctant to change their lifestyles in order to create space for others.

What I've tried to do in the book is give some historical context to explain how we got here. Because it is quite important to understand that background as we now look, hopefully, to embed some of the solutions to this multi-layered system problem. It's not just an environmental problem we have. It's linked to some other really big dimensions of how our societies work, and we need to look at all those things together. It's called systems thinking.

NR: Talk to me about what those layers are and what action we need to take within to move towards the kind of thriving planet that you describe in the book.

TJ: Part of the challenge we face in fixing these environmental questions is that we wrongly treat them simply as environmental questions. This as a bit like trying to understand the character of topsoil without understanding the bedrock and how it shapes the geology and the topography of a landscape. Because the topsoil is really a manifestation of some really deeper things that are going on.

The environmental layer is underpinned by an economic layer, and underneath that is a political layer. That layer is derived from the interaction between decisions and voters, and the voters expecting ever rising living standards. That drives the politics, which leads to the economic growth.

Then underneath that is a cultural layer, which we massively underestimate in terms of how this drives outcomes. Culture is profound. We hardly even notice it – it's a bit like the air we breathe – but we really register the power of what it's doing. At the moment, we live in a consumerist culture, living in ways which are shaped by our friends and family, what we see coming out of advertising and marketing. It takes us in a particular direction, which then feeds through into the politics, which then shapes the economics.

Beneath all of that, right at the very base layer of the bedrock, is our philosophical worldview, and that in modern societies in the West is utterly detached from nature. We don't see ourselves as part of the natural order. We see everything as solvable by technology. We have parted company with wisdom that used to shape societies for many tens of thousands of years. That explains what goes on above, because we have lost any kind of emotional, personal understanding of how nature works and the importance of it, and therefore trying to make sense of it in the cultural, political or economic layers, is very difficult.

What are we going to do about that? The simple point is that environmentalists need to be thinking more broadly than parts per million of CO2 or where the best protected areas are. We must do that, but it needs to be translated and connected into these different layers, and to be able to find ways of building momentum that is more than simply a lot of facts being endlessly recycled by good advocacy and good communications.

NR: After 40 years of environmental campaigning, what gives you hope?

TJ: There are glimpses of hope everywhere, all the time, but we have to see the difference between the likelihood and the possibility of good outcomes. We really need to be focusing in those areas where we can see hope and where we can make most progress.

Can we come up with some new economic ideas? Can we empower Indigenous peoples? Can we get people with power and influence to be advocating for big, systemic change? And the answer to all of that is yes, but it's no good just hoping for it. We're going to have to make it happen, and so we're going to have to do some work. That's sometimes a little bit of a danger with optimism, that it can become unwarranted – we sit back and think that probably it's going to be all right. We need, therefore, to take on the mantle of seeking change as well as hoping that we'll get change.

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Just Earth: How a Fairer World Will Save the Planet by Tony Juniper is published by Bloomsbury.

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