Donut Economics Chicago City Portrait

View the Chicago Donut 2025 report using the chidec.org home page, or view the PDF file directly here.

What is Donut Economics?

Or "Doughnut Economics" for much of the world 😉

Humanity’s current challenge is to meet the needs of all (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice) within the means of our planet (stable climate, fertile soils, and a protective ozone layer). Kate Raworth introduced the ideas of Donut Economics, where the “donut” is a way to visualize how well we’re meeting these social and planetary boundaries, on both a local and global scale.

About this visualization

DATA. Chicagoland Donut Economics Coalition has pulled together data to understand our Chicago community’s position in these boundaries, serving as a compass for how we can improve (following the methodology of Creating City Portraits and Doughnut Unrolled: Data Portrait of Place). We started by focusing on commonly used Social (inner circle) and Ecological (outer circle) impacts -- in particular indicators and data used for the SeaDEC (Seattle) Donut has been helpful. Below is our 2025 Chicago Donut. We’d love to get your thoughts and ideas as we work to improve our understanding! There is more to do in 2026: gather more data, get community feedback, and report on the four lenses of the donut: Local-Social, Local-Ecological, Global-Social and Global-Ecological.

INTERACTIVE DONUT. Much thanks to SeaDEC for providing the source code for displaying the interactive donut. For the Chicago version, it was easy to use their code, and we're using mostly the same text on this page that came from SeaDEC. THANK YOU SeaDEC!!!

To contact us, use the Contact Us form at the bottom of the chidec.org home page.
Also you can reach out to chidec25@gmail with questions or ideas for collaboration.