Identifying common features among household consumption patterns optimized to minimize specific environmental burdens
Introduction
Changes in household consumption patterns have considerable potential to improve the environmental performance of a nation. In Japan, 13% of total CO2 emissions in 2000 were associated directly with household consumption and 36% with the production of commodities purchased by households [1]. Although the CO2 efficiency of certain production technologies has improved in recent years, these gains have been cancelled out by overall growth in household consumption [2]. The serious implications of ever-increasing resource consumption and environmental burdens due to expanding human activity have been pointed out since the 1950s (e.g., Refs. [3], [4], [5], [6]). Today, the importance of a shift in consumption patterns is also recognized in the global political arena. A notable milestone in this context was Agenda 21, adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro [7], which focused on unsustainable patterns of production and consumption. Another was the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg in 2002 [8], which reconfirmed the necessity of promoting a shift toward sustainable consumption and production patterns.
Environmental analyses based on the life-cycle perspective, typified by energy analysis and life-cycle assessment (LCA), have thus far quantified some of the linkages between human consumption and environmental issues [9]. For instance, they have considered energy consumption (e.g., Refs. [10], [11], [12], [13]), greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., Refs. [14], [15], [16], [17], [18]), wastes (e.g., Refs. [19], [20]) and other environmental discharges (e.g., Refs. [21], [22]). There have also been studies in which the Ecological Footprint [23] is used to assess the sustainability of consumption (e.g., Refs. [24], [25]). It would be an important step, however, if consumers could simply be shown what kind of consumption pattern they should shift to, based on the implications of these studies. One means to this end would be an indicator that helps consumers more readily understand the relationship between their consumption and the environmental burdens to which it gives rise and guides them towards more desirable consumption patterns having less environmental impact. This could serve as an important tool in weaning us off our current, unsustainable consumption patterns.
In a previous study [26] we proposed a compact indicator identifying the environmental characteristics of commodities from the viewpoint of optimal changes in household expenditure on them. That study examined the commonalities and differences among consumption patterns optimized with respect to minimizing a certain type of environmental burden. It considered only 4 types of environmental burden, however, and employed a model based on only a rough classification of commodities, using the 94 sectors of the Japanese input–output tables. As such, it was insufficiently detailed for us to understand what the indicator implies in terms of the actual goods and services consumed in everyday life. Against this background, the present study seeks to further elaborate the previous work and examine in greater detail the commonalties and differences among multiple optimal consumption patterns geared to mitigating a range of environmental burdens. The new model considers 399 commodity sectors and 13 environmental burdens congruent with the major environmental problems facing us today. After identifying commonalities among the multiple optimal consumption patterns computed by the model, we classify commodity sectors into 3 types. This simple classification might serve as a useful indicator for identifying the preferred direction of future shifts in patterns of consumption in Japan and elsewhere.
Section snippets
Input–output system in the model
This study elaborates a linear programming model that computes optimal consumption patterns under particular economic and environmental constraints. This model is used to identify household consumption patterns having less environmental impact than today's. It is built around an input–output system that comprehensively relates all the commodities consumed by Japanese households to 13 kinds of environmental emission, thereby considering both direct and indirect emissions. The former include, for
Advantages and drawbacks of the environmental minimization scenarios
By changing the type of environmental burden in the model's objective function, the model can calculate multiple optimal consumption patterns under the aforementioned constraints. With respect to the likelihood of a change in consumption, we first assumed the adjustable range of household consumption was ±10% of the consumption pattern in 1995 (hcrt). In other words, it was assumed that present expenditure on each commodity could increase or decrease by up to 10%. Vectors hL and hU in Eq. (7)
Conclusions
In this study a linear programming model was developed that formulates the relationship between household consumption and generation of environmental burdens, both direct and indirect. Using Japanese economic and environmental data, the model was used to calculate multiple optimal household consumption patterns, differing in the type of environmental burden they sought to minimize. The environmental advantages and drawbacks of each of these optimized consumption patterns were then examined.
The
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to Mr Nigel Harle in the Netherlands for his editing of the English.
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