Quantifying environmental impacts of consumption: Implications for governance

Abstract

Ultimately, all production is driven by consumption. It is hence final consumption by humanity that drives the environmental impacts of production. In the past, global trade was just a small part of the economic production within a country. At that time, the monitoring of carbon and other emissions and resource extraction at country level was reasonably representative of the environmental pressures caused by consumption in each country. However, in recent decades, growth in international trade has outpaced the growth of global gross domestic product (GDP). It is no longer sufficient to analyse the impacts of production at national level (Peters et al., 2011; Wiedmann et al., 2011). Consumption in one country drives production in value chains spanning many others. This creates a complex, global web of activities impacting the environment in multi-faceted ways (Tukker and Dietzenbacher, 2013). For proper governance of sustainable consumption, it is essential to understand how consumption of specific categories of goods and services in specific countries (and ideally by specific consumer groups) drive environmental impacts in global value chains.