Future Evaluation of Sustainable Consumption

In 2022, a Swedish all-parties parliamentary committee, suggested that Sweden should have a consumption-based climate target of net-zero emissions in 2045. This initiative makes Sweden one of the first countries to explore target-setting on its consumption-based footprint.

Historically, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, require greenhouse gas emissions to be reported from a territorial inventory perspective.

For highly-connected, and generally high-income, countries, this generates a bias whereby imported goods and their emissions are not accounted for.

By adopting consumption-based targets, new policy discussion will become necessary, which needs to be based on sound scientific assessments. Reaching a consumption-based emission target requires combination of economic strategies and end-use policies.

It is also crucial to account for changes in the surrounding economy as Europe imports goods from the rest of the world.

In this project, we aim at systematically assessing the current and future environmental impacts of a specific demand, by integrating prospective scenario modelling, input-output analysis, and micro-economic methods, in a single framework.

Two case studies will illustrate the accounting framework and its flexibility, namely Sweden and Luxembourg, forecasting their economies and applying various consumption-based policies, and assessing their environmental impacts and effectiveness to reach climate mitigation targets.