Ecological modernization has been the main political strategy employed by western industrialized countries to combat environmental degradation and resource depletion. It has been the main answer to the Club of Rome’s diagnosis of “limits to growth”. During the period from the late 1980s to the early 2010, this strategy helped to postpone the limits to growth and led to an impressive growth of the ecological limits of economic activity. This period of latency regarding the limits of growth is now coming to an end. The reason is obvious: relative gains in eco-efficiency are increasingly overcompensated by absolute growth. This leads to the question of what comes after ecological modernization? One option that I call "ecological civilization" is based on the idea of sufficiency. Instead of increasing the eco-efficiency of production processes, products and services, the basic idea is to reduce these activities in absolute terms. The major problem with this approach is its relative lack of political feasibility. A second option is what I call "Ecological Modernization 2.0". This is an approach that aims to atenuate environmental degradation by means of large technical systems such as geoengineering or Bioenergy combined with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS). I argue that this second approach, due to its greater political acceptance and feasibility, has greater chances of becoming the dominant pillar of environmental policy in the 21st century than the sufficiency-based approach of ecological civilization.

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Ecological Modernization,Environmental Policy,Sustainable Development