Sustainable production and consumption

As consumers, our lives is based on goods, services and activities that depend on the production of greenhouse gas emissions. The rise in emissions is due to growing consumption (need for energy) combined with an expanding global population.

The GHG assessment can be made from the point of the production or the consumption. As in our days goods are traded on a global market our approach is from the consumption side. The countries participating in the global market from the point of CO₂ emission can be CO₂ exporters or importers. Countries like China export approx. 25% of their products, therefore they are a CO₂ exporter country, others like the USA and United Kingdom are CO₂ importers.  

Several surveys made in the past prove that consumers are willing to reduce the GHG emission, but the products/services with low carbon emission can not be found on the market or their price is unacceptable. Related information is scarce. As an example, we present the survey made by the Gallup Institute in 2009 of EU 27 countries and Croatia (source: EUROBAROMETER, 2009). According to the survey, a large proportion of the consumers (41%) are aware that buying and consumption of goods has an environmental impact. 

On the question if they are looking on the products energy efficiency, 40% answered that they always do, and 37% answered that they do in the majority of the cases

On the question related with the labelling of products with a carbon footprint label, as proving the GHG reduction, 72% of the respondents said that the label should be compulsory.

As the production and consumption chain has several participants, a separate strategy, recommendation or guideline for each should be developed. Par example, for enterprises reducing the energy consumption, using green energy, production of low carbon/green products, use of carbon emission reduction possibilities (carbon footprinting, carbon management), for consumers rising the environment awareness (energy, carbon), for decision makers (authorities, local governments) giving good examples. 

In order to reduce the negative impact of the climate change, a change should be made in consumer behaviour. No easy task in welfare (e.g. western) societies where the choice of different goods present a great value. For solving the problem, several books were published giving guidelines on how to choose between different products. In our days the initiatives relating to changing the consumption behaviour more or less are related with product prices, campaign or other offers. This activity has some positive results, but we are far from optimal consumers awareness and the changes achieved do not correspond to the size of the problem. 

Consumption is a complex aspect in our behaviour, where the influencing factors are changing in time and space. They are linked with the available resources, social background, culture, traditions, infrastructure and others. We have to keep in mind that changing an element in our behaviour can have a positive or negative impact on other related elements. In order to avoid the rebound effect the efforts to change the consumer behaviour has to be treated in a complex way. For example changing the light bulbs to energy efficient ones, or insulating a house do not compensate the higher number of flights of the given household.  A similar situation can arise in a welfare country when the energy intensive production having high GHG emission are outsourced into a less developed countries. Furthermore it is questionable that promotion of food consumption with high GHG emission (e.g. meet consumption) to the general public in a less developed country is driving the consumer in the direction of sustainable production and consumption.