What is the level of development that the Global South can sustainably aspire to? We argue that positioning Nordic countries as the leaders of "sustainable development", as is often done, poses a serious dilemma: international adoption of their lifestyles risks severely breaching planetary biophysical limits, while non-adoption risks perpetuating developmental inequality. We introduce a revised conceptual framework for "sustainable development" emphasising scalability as a pivotal facet. Our results highlight Panama, Costa Rica, and Sri Lanka as having achieved high levels of social progress with low environmental pressures, representing a more realistic aspiration for the rest of humanity. 

Dr Chirag Dhara is a quantum physicist turned climate scientist holding two doctorates: one in Earth System Science (2017) from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and University of Hamburg, Germany and the other in Photonics (2013) from the Institute of Photonic Sciences and Universitat Polytecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain. Prior to joining Krea University, he spent two years as a Research Associate at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM). He co-authored India’s first comprehensive climate change assessment report released by IITM in June, 2020 (as an official report of the Ministry of Earth Science, India). He is also a contributing author to the IPCC AR6 report (2021). In 2018-2019, he freelanced for Firstpost, a digital news portal, writing on climate change science and impacts.

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