Sustainable Consumption

Abstract

Increasing consumption of consumer products and services with significant environmental and social impacts is a key contributor to many of today’s sustainability challenges e.g., climate change, resource depletion (energy, water, biomass, metals, land use, and biodiversity loss), waste, pollution and social inequities. Consumer products are among those with the most significant environmental and social footprint. In particular, production and consumption of high-impact products and services, e.g., food, our homes, how we heat/cool them, the electronics we use, transport, clothing and tourism are recognized contributing factors to our most critical environmental and social challenges. Sustainable consumption and production (SCP) provides one set of solutions to tackling this. Supply side sustainable production measures to improve the sustainability performance of products across supply chains can only bring us so far. The role of the consumer in shifting consumption patterns so we can live ethically within our “one planet” means as well as the wider infrastructure to support this is also a key part of the solution. For this reason, influencing a shift to sustainable lifestyles is a growing focus for policy makers and other stakeholders with strong influence on consumer choice, e.g., retailers, brand manufacturers, educators and the media. Outside of this, the debate is growing on the inherent conflict between a traditional market economics system that continues to drive growth as resource limits become more obvious. This is forcing a more sophisticated approach to the new business and consumer models we are likely to need beyond SCP to meet our sustainability challenges as our population expands to an anticipated nine billion by 2050. In order to enable SCP demand and supply side measures to work, a paradigm shift in our economic system is needed. Key changes include internalizing environmental externality costs of production and consumption to send accurate market signals, remove perverse fiscal incentives, and actually motivate sustainable behavior change financially. In addition, our measures and indicators of success at country and business levels need to go beyond economic indicators, e.g., gross domestic product (GDP) alone, to incorporate not only financial but natural and social capital, as well as ensuring the required prioritization of these in practice. A re-evaluation of human needs and wants is part of this paradigm shift with new definitions for how consumers and producers measure “value” reflected in new business and consumer models.