Towards a new view of sustainable development: human well-being and environmental stress

In a path-breaking 1974 paper, Mazur and Rosa demonstrated that across nations energy consumption had decoupled from lifestyle (Mazur and Rosa 1974). Their analysis shattered a taken-for-granted assumption about development: that increasing human well-being was synonymous with increased resource consumption. This foundational study led to an ongoing research program with multiple strands (e.g. Dietz et al 2012, Jorgenson 2014, Knight and Rosa 2011, Steinberger and Roberts 2010) that examines how we can increase human well-being while reducing the stress humans place on the environment. Mazur and Rosa not only showed that resource consumption and well-being were not in lockstep, but also demonstrated the value of cross-national comparisons as a means of understanding human ecology and informing environmental policy (Dietz and Jorgenson 2013).

Lamb et al (2014) provide two important contributions to this multidisciplinary area of sustainability research. First, they conduct one of the first analyses of consumption-based carbon emissions. As they note, a substantial literature examines consumption-based environmental stress, measured as the ecological footprint, but the footprint aggregates across multiple environmental stressors. While useful in many ways including for testing hypotheses from human ecology, the ecological footprint might be too much of a 'black box' composite index for some questions about sustainability. Analyses of energy consumption and anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions narrow the focus to a specific stressor, but most such studies have used estimates based on the point of emissions, and thus on production, rather than on the consumption that drives emissions. Lamb et al (2014) show that for consumption-based emissions population growth is more important than it is for emissions allocated by direct energy use, while urbanization (the per cent of a population residing in urban areas) is less important. We anticipate that their analysis will be one of the first of many studies that compare the drivers consumption-based emissions with production-based emissions.

Their second important contribution is to point us towards heterogeneity across nations. A growing literature emphasizes variation across nations and over time in the driving forces of environmental change (Jorgenson and Clark 2012, York 2012, Roberts and Grimes 1997). Identifying nations that are particularly efficient or inefficient in producing human well-being relative to their impact on the environment is also a key theme in the Environmental Intensity of Well-Being literature (e.g. Dietz et al 2009), Lamb et al (2014) move forward by a two step strategy. They first analyze the human factors that drive carbon emitting consumption. They then use cluster analysis to identify groups of countries that are similar with regard to these factors and plot the resulting groups in a two dimensional space defined by carbon emissions per capita and life expectancy (perhaps the most widely accepted measure of human well-being). Several important patterns emerge.

First, once a low threshold is reached (perhaps 0.5 tonnes C per capita) there is no relationship between well-being and stress placed on the environment. This is consistent with the finding of Mazur and Rosa (1974) and much work since. Second, a group of about twenty countries occupy an advantageous area within the overall space—they have relatively low C emissions but relatively high life expectancies. They are very efficient in the sense that a great deal of well-being is produced for relatively little stress on the environment. Third, the common feature of the nations found here are low to moderate incomes. They are otherwise diverse, and include countries with open and closed economies, slow and rapid population growth, quite low and moderate levels of affluence and warm and cold climates.

Like most important studies, Lamb et al (2014) raise many questions for future research. Their findings reinforce the growing realization that increases in human well-being are not tightly or uniformly associated with gross domestic product per capita or other measures of economic activity, nor with resource consumption. But we need to better understand why some countries occupy that felicitous space characterized by low emissions and high life expectancy. Lamb et al note that these countries are for the most part unexceptional in energy use: their emissions are generally what one would expect given their affluence, the openness of their economies, and their climate. So membership in this 'happy few' must depend in large part on their ability to produce long life expectancy. In-depth quantitative and case study analyses are clearly needed to identify the conditions and mechanisms unique to these nations that lead to their higher life expectancies. Further work is also warranted to see if these relationships obtain when alternative measures of human well-being are deployed, and when other forms of stress on the environment are interrogated. As important, future research should ask the same questions as Lamb et al (2014) but instead employ longitudinal methods to allow for a closer examination of the temporality of these interrelationships.

Beyond its analytical advances, the study also has implications for both policy and for our conceptualization of sustainability. One of the major blockages in international climate negotiations is the expressed desire of low income nations to be exempt from any strenuous restrictions on their emissions. But Lamb et al suggest that at least one key goal of development, enhanced life expectancy, is not necessarily related to carbon emissions. So beyond a low threshold level, it makes little sense for less affluent (and less emitting) nations to mimic the development paths of the more affluent nations, who are producing substantial environmental damage with relatively limited benefit to human well-being.

The literature focusing on the tradeoff between environmental stress and human well-being may also help us develop new ways of thinking about sustainability. Sustainability might be defined as increasing the efficiency with which we produce well-being relative to the harm we do to the environment. Such an approach is consistent with recent policy calls to look beyond affluence as a metric of well-being (Stiglitz et al 2009). Of course, we should also move beyond an anthropocentric approach by also taking into account the well-being of non-human species.

Acknowledgment