Environmental Project, 904 – Consumption and the Environment in Europe

Consumption and the Environment in Europe

1 Introduction

In recent years, the environmental impacts of consumption have received an increasing amount of attention, in particular in the international discussions of sustainable development. There are three major concerns:

That consumption growth is depleting renewable and mineral resources, and causing irreversible damage to the environment
That a large proportion of the world's population has been left out of the transformation in quality of life seen by industrialised countries in the 20^th century
That improving the economic standard of living does not necessarily lead to an improvement in the broader quality of life.

However, those involved in the sustainability debate have yet to agree on the answer to a central question: does sustainable consumption mean consuming less, consuming differently, or some combination of the two? Agenda 21, the policy document agreed by governments at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, speaks of the need for:

“new concepts of wealth and prosperity which allow higher standards of living through changed lifestyles and are less dependent on the Earth's finite resources”.

During the 1990s, a number of efforts were made to clarify what is meant by sustainable consumption and how it fits with the sustainable development agenda. Intergovernmental and academic workshops struggled with concepts, definitions and conflicting priorities (Ofstad,1994; Stern et al., 1997; Crocker and Linden, 1998; IIED, 1998). But little progress was made towards shared understanding.

The Johannesburg Summit in 2002 called for a 10-year framework of programmes on sustainable consumption and production (UNDSD, 2003a, 2003b). The framework is to promote and facilitate international cooperation in moving towards sustainable consumption and production, among countries, international organisations, the private sector, environmental and consumer organisations and other non-governmental organisations. An expert meeting in Marrakech in 2003 began to identify the key issues and challenges for the programme. Some governments have also begun to develop their own national programmes on consumption and production. But despite the efforts made by governments and others, possible approaches to sustainable consumption are still developed in only the sketchiest of terms.

Several international organisations, including the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the European Environment Agency (EEA) are working to deepen understanding of consumption and of possible government strategies to encourage more sustainable consumption. This report for the Danish Environmental Protection Agency seeks to support these efforts. In particular, it will form a background paper for the EEA's report on household consumption and the environment.

The current report sets out to make the idea of environmentally sustainable consumption a little more concrete by exploring the outlook for consumption and the environment, considering the forces shaping consumption and reviewing scenarios in which lifestyles and consumption patterns might become more sustainable.

Chapter 2 sets the scene. It first notes the level and the complexity of the changes in consumption patterns that have occurred in the last hundred years. It goes on to identify the consumption clusters that are responsible for the greatest environmental impacts in Europe; these are food, housing and transport. It explores some of the economic, technological, social and cultural influences on consumption in those clusters; maps out some of the major consumption trends in the EU15 (the European Union Member States prior to May 2004) and the ten Accession Countries (joining the EU in 2004); and provides a brief evaluation of the environmental implications of those trends.

Chapters 3 and 4 look in a little more depth at the demographic, economic, technological, social and cultural factors that are helping to shape the consumer society. They also look at the ways in which these forces may be changing and identify some of the possibilities for future developments.

Chapter 5 reviews existing scenarios and outlooks in the literature and evaluates their relevance to the concepts developed especially in Chapter 4. It draws on three European scenarios to 2030, organised around alternative cultural and institutional forms. The scenarios offer three different routes by which the environmental impacts of European consumption could be significantly reduced. The chapter closes by drawing out some of the implications for sustainable consumption strategies.

The report concludes that the future is unlikely to conform to any one of the scenarios, but may contain elements of all of them. It identifies some of the implications for possible action that could be taken by governments, business and civil society to prepare for a future transition to more sustainable patterns of consumption.