190
As recommendations, we consider the most important steps for public and
private organisations to support consumers in their consumption and lifestyle
choices to be the following ones:
• Increase the availability of interoperable life cycle inventory and impact data,
including Product Environmental Footprints and other Environmental Product
Declarations, so they can serve for better consumer information and can be combined into lifestyle studies. Agreements on interoperability across industry and
governments – ideally on a global level – would be needed for this, in coordination with the software and data developers in consulting and research that support such work.
• Improve the data and evidence base for consumer choices on how freed household resources are reallocated. As interim step, working with scenarios as
described in Sect. 3.2 can serve. Governmental research efforts should be directed
at this task.
• Develop robust methodologies for capturing the secondary consequences of consumption, expanding on proposed approaches e.g. of Hofstetter et al. (2006) and
of the environmental intensity of needs fulfilment, e.g. advancing the approach
that we have sketched in Sects. 2.7 and 2.8. Government research funding or
dedicated method development calls – as multi-stakeholder projects rather than
a research exercise – in support of government analysis would be essential here.
In this, it will be important to bring together experts from the fields of economy
and life cycle experts: differences in terminology and approaches need to be
overcome in interdisciplinary work.
• Stepwise develop a wide set of more environmentally sustainable lifestyles as
archetypes for consumers to adopt and adapt from. As argued in Sect. 3.2, it is
more accurate to assess the overall environmental impact of a whole archetype
lifestyle than for many individual products, because the important secondary
consequences on available household resources are automatically covered and
zero. Scenarios on lifestyle approaches (e.g. “buy local”, “eat vegetarian”)
should be analyzed and used to support communication with consumers to
separate the more efficient and effective approaches from those that only apparently reduce the environmental impact.
• Consider secondary consequences when developing public infrastructure, financial instruments and other legislation directed at more sustainable consumption
and lifestyles, e.g. in public transport, internet bandwidth
10
and others.
• Continue and strengthen the efforts for developing and distributing education
and information materials for industry, government officials and citizen – the
understanding of what makes up a “sustainable products” and sustainable lifestyles is argued here to be very limited outside a few dedicated expert groups.
10 A recent expert workshop on environmentally sound data centers, organized by the European
Commission’s DG CONNECT and composed of data centre developers, operators and users, has
warned that “bandwidth growth needs to be better linked to the ability of technological developments to cope with it in terms of the related energy consumption and environmental impacts” (Wolf
2014b).
M.-A. Wolf and K. Chomkhamsri
As recommendations, we consider the most important steps for public and
private organisations to support consumers in their consumption and lifestyle
choices to be the following ones:
• Increase the availability of interoperable life cycle inventory and impact data,
including Product Environmental Footprints and other Environmental Product
Declarations, so they can serve for better consumer information and can be combined into lifestyle studies. Agreements on interoperability across industry and
governments – ideally on a global level – would be needed for this, in coordination with the software and data developers in consulting and research that support such work.
• Improve the data and evidence base for consumer choices on how freed household resources are reallocated. As interim step, working with scenarios as
described in Sect. 3.2 can serve. Governmental research efforts should be directed
at this task.
• Develop robust methodologies for capturing the secondary consequences of consumption, expanding on proposed approaches e.g. of Hofstetter et al. (2006) and
of the environmental intensity of needs fulfilment, e.g. advancing the approach
that we have sketched in Sects. 2.7 and 2.8. Government research funding or
dedicated method development calls – as multi-stakeholder projects rather than
a research exercise – in support of government analysis would be essential here.
In this, it will be important to bring together experts from the fields of economy
and life cycle experts: differences in terminology and approaches need to be
overcome in interdisciplinary work.
• Stepwise develop a wide set of more environmentally sustainable lifestyles as
archetypes for consumers to adopt and adapt from. As argued in Sect. 3.2, it is
more accurate to assess the overall environmental impact of a whole archetype
lifestyle than for many individual products, because the important secondary
consequences on available household resources are automatically covered and
zero. Scenarios on lifestyle approaches (e.g. “buy local”, “eat vegetarian”)
should be analyzed and used to support communication with consumers to
separate the more efficient and effective approaches from those that only apparently reduce the environmental impact.
• Consider secondary consequences when developing public infrastructure, financial instruments and other legislation directed at more sustainable consumption
and lifestyles, e.g. in public transport, internet bandwidth
10
and others.
• Continue and strengthen the efforts for developing and distributing education
and information materials for industry, government officials and citizen – the
understanding of what makes up a “sustainable products” and sustainable lifestyles is argued here to be very limited outside a few dedicated expert groups.
10 A recent expert workshop on environmentally sound data centers, organized by the European
Commission’s DG CONNECT and composed of data centre developers, operators and users, has
warned that “bandwidth growth needs to be better linked to the ability of technological developments to cope with it in terms of the related energy consumption and environmental impacts” (Wolf
2014b).
M.-A. Wolf and K. Chomkhamsri