Today, countries around the world are faced with a dilemma of trade-offs: should they continue to prioritise economic growth at the expense of the environment, basic human needs, inequality and other important aspects? Many people used to think that unlimited economic growth was the measure of a country's success. However, an increasingly dynamic and complex life leads to a search for a new standard because in fact environmental and social issues are still rampant when economic statistics state that it is experiencing growth. Basically, the current economic paradigm still pays too much attention to the human aspect as a source of life instead of the environment and other living things that also have reciprocal benefits for humans themselves.
Until 2012, a paper entitled A Safe and Just Space for Humanity: Can We Live Within the Doughnut? published in Oxfam Report in 2012 by Kate Raworth who is an economist from Oxford University, proposed a radical economic model that caught the attention of the UN and the global scene that every country should be sceptical of economic growth in the 21st century. The model became known as Doughnut Economics. The meaning of 'Doughnut' here is that Kate Raworth believes that a healthy and ideal economic picture is that the fulfilment of human needs must be within a doughnut circle bounded by two ring boundaries: social foundation & ecological (environmental) roof. From this 'doughnut' model, it can also be seen that the goal of the economy should be the utilisation of resources so that all people (without exception) have access to basic needs, such as water, food, income, education, and health.
On the other hand, the economy should only grow at a rate that does not exceed the roof of the environment: air conditions, clean water, land, biodiversity, ozone, and so on. For example, climate change could reduce the GDP of the world economy by 11-18% if global temperatures increase by 3.2 degrees C by 2050, according to Swiss Re Institute predictions. If economic growth goes beyond the environmental roof, the global community will not be able to fulfil its basic needs. Moreover, people living under the social foundation ring will be forced to use resources in an unhealthy and unsustainable way to fulfil their basic needs. This model has also been reflected by data released by the WHO that in fact 2.7 billion people still rely on traditional access to cooking, such as biomass (wood, animal dung, charcoal, and crop residues) and coal. The result of burning biomass and coal and local deforestation activities will only affect environmental stability and even exacerbate poverty itself.
The general understanding of economics is that it is a discipline that studies how to allocate limited resources because humans have unlimited wants. Scarcity and competition are manifestations of the conventional economic idea that humans have unlimited wants for limited resources. As a result, it raises new issues, such as humanitarian and environmental issues. On the other hand, research conducted by Prof. Hafas Furqani, an academic from the Faculty and Islamic Business at Ar-Raniry State Islamic University as well as the West Indonesia Coordinator of the DPP IAEI, investigated the subject matter of Islamic economics as a scientific discipline and found that Islamic economics views "sufficiency" of resources rather than "scarcity". The "sufficiency" perspective will usher in the concept of co-operation in sharing resources. This perspective could prove that an economy that adopts Islamic values is in line with the 'doughnut' economic model that promotes balance, rather than unlimited growth.
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