Experts on an international panel looking into sustainable resources planning, which met in Budapest at the end of last year, shared the same departure point: we need to decouple growth from resource consumption. And to do so, we need to massively increase the efficiency of production and consumption processes, finding substitutes for key resources, and recycling and reusing all the waste outputs.

This, in reality, is the absolute centre of the sustainable development challenge translated into the real world of economic policy making. What it means is that we need to find ways of managing economies in ways that will ensure that they require less and less primary resources. Agreement on this point was, for me, an affirmation of my own thinking that has enjoyed little resonance in South Africa. The paper I presented to the presidency’s workshop in April last year – covering these very points – went down like a lead balloon. It was entitled Growth, Sustainability and Dematerialisation: Resource Options for South Africa 2019. But at least the concepts of ‘decoupling’ and ‘dematerialisation’ that I put into the report did make it into the National Framework for Sustainable Development that was adopted by Cabinet later in the year.