A holy grail of environmental policy is an economy that delivers prosperity without requiring the ever-increasing consumption of raw materials.

Increasing incomes while reducing environmental pressures hinges on the “decoupling” of energy emissions from economic growth. Some countries in the global economy are moving in the right direction.

But this good news can be misleading. Our new study takes a long-term (50 years) look at the economy in over 100 countries, and an even longer-term look at the UK’s economy (over 150 years). Our findings are much less reassuring.

We used the most recent data for a measure called the material footprint. This counts everything a country actually consumes – including the resources extracted abroad to make its imports. To begin with the results were positive: 25 countries appear to have pulled off decoupled growth – the UK among them. Their GDP keeps climbing while their material use drifts downward.

But certain claims were being inflated in three ways. This is not to say green growth is impossible – only that the evidence claims too much.

1. Resource use isn’t falling enough

Economies are not getting to the safe limits we need to operate........

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