A new update to an influential economic theory called "Doughnut Economics" shows a global economy on a collision course with nature.

The influential book by Kate Raworth, "Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist," was first published in 2017. It was lauded for its ability to convey the complexity of global social and environmental issues in a single, easy-to-understand diagram.

The doughnut shape represents the safe and just operating space for humanity.

The hole at the center of the doughnut represents a shortfall in the social foundations necessary for people to live safe and just lives.

The area outside the doughnut shows ecological overshoot across a range of domains, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and ocean acidification.

Now, Andrew Fanning and Kate Raworth have published the first update to the Doughnut Economics framework since 2017 in Nature.

The original global doughnut portrait was a static picture at a single point in time. The recently published update turns this into an annual time series spanning from 2000 to 2022. This means we can now monitor trends in global social and ecological health over time.

What these trends show is alarming.

While global gross domestic product (GDP) has more than doubled, progress on meeting social foundations has slowed and ecological overshoot has accelerated. In other words, we are damaging critical biophysical processes at a faster rate than we're improving people's lives.

The update shows an overshoot on six of the nine critical global planetary boundaries. Separate published research indicates we've since crossed a seventh boundary, ocean acidification.

Raworth’s conceptual doughnut. Credit: Raworth, K (2025). The Evolving Doughnut, Doughnut Economics Action Lab, Oxford, CC BY-SA

Rich nations dominate the damage to the environment

The other important change in this update is the breakdown of data by nation, allowing comparison between groups of countries. This illustrates the unequal nature of economic development and the trade-off between social foundations and ecological overshoot that the current economic system creates.

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