Standard session (discussion following 4 presentations)
Presentation [part of the standard session “Resources and Energy”]
Paris obligations make the inevitability of consumption reductions for affluent societies undeniable if we combine 3 non-radical demands: 1) equal per-capita allocation of the global carbon budget, 2) accounting for carbon footprints of imports/exports, 3) non-reliance on yet unproven technologies.
Presenters: Jefim Vogel (Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds)
Language: English with German translation
Technical details: Standard E_Jefim Vogel_Fair carbon budgets and fair counting as levers for Degrowth.mp4, MPEG-4 video, 56.4MB
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- A sufficiency assessment: do people think they have enough? Video
We investigate how individuals think about ‘having enough’ and ‘wanting more’ in the contemporary society on a financial, material and leisure level. Furthermore, we analyze how this relates to people’s relative preference for income versus leisure. Results are based on a Flemish survey (N=1118).
Presenters: Damaris Castro (Ghent University) - Living degrowth? Investigating degrowth practices through performative methods Video
Based on recently published research using performative methods Johannes will discuss (i) what it could mean to “live degrowth” by portraying a diverse range of interrelated practices and (ii) attempt to answer how “living degrowth” could be conceptualized as a transformative endeavour.
Presenters: Johannes Brossmann (actinGreen) - Practice patterns for degrowth
Insights from sociological practice theories, Alexandrian pattern theory, and research on business models conceived as activity systems have been systematically integrated into degrowth research. This integration resulted in a new heuristic device: the ‘practice pattern framework‘ and a corresponding conception of economic activity systems. It allows for comparing and unifying research findings into a consistent format – practice patterns. Practice patterns draw attention towards the functional logic, contextual conditions, requirements, and interrelations organizing human capacity to perform economic activities. Thereby, they facilitate articulating, challenging, transferring, and recombining tacit and dispersed knowledge into actionable knowledge for degrowth.
Presenters: Tobias Froese (ESCP) - The environmental impact of lifestyles changes, satisfying human needs and grassroots activists Video
The present work aims to contribute in three major ways- 1) By connecting fundamental human needs by Max-Neef et al to global carbon emissions and their satisfaction. 2) By employing an Environmentally Extended MultiRegional Input-Output (EE-MRIO) to assess the outcomes of massive consumption-related lifestyles changes envisioned by stakeholders via backcasting workshops across Europe. 3) By applying a comprehensive lifestyle survey to assess individual members of sustainability grassroots initiatives and quantify their ability and hindrance to overcome structural constrains to reduce their footprint while enhancing life satisfaction. Our results suggest that initiative members uncover lifestyle features that not only enable lower emissions, but also reconcile emissions with income and well-being.
Presenters: Gibran Vita (Open University of the Netherlands)
This is a link to a torrent video file. By clicking on ‘external content’ you will be opening a magnet link that will allow you to download the corresponding video with a torrent client. To learn more about downloading torrents see here.
Presentation [Part of the standard session “Practicing Degrowth“]
We investigate how individuals think about ‘having enough’ and ‘wanting more’ in the contemporary society on a financial, material and leisure level. Furthermore, we analyze how this relates to people’s relative preference for income versus leisure. Results are based on a Flemish survey (N=1118).
Presenters: Damaris Castro (Ghent University)
Language: English
Technical Details: Standard O_DAMARIS CASTRO_A sufficiency assessment_ do people think they have enough_.mp4
This is a link to a torrent video file. By clicking on ‘external content’ you will be opening a magnet link that will allow you to download the corresponding video with a torrent client. To learn more about downloading torrents see here.
It is increasingly clear that averting ecological breakdown will require drastic changes to contemporary human society and the global economy embedded within it. On the other hand, the basic material needs of billions of people across the planet remain unmet. Here, we develop a simple, bottom-up model to estimate a practical minimal threshold for the final energy consumption required to provide decent material livings to the entire global population. We find that global final energy consumption in 2050 could be reduced to the levels of the 1960s, despite a population three times larger. However, such a world requires a massive rollout of advanced technologies across all sectors, as well as radical demand-side changes to reduce consumption – regardless of income – to levels of sufficiency. Sufficiency is, however, far more materially generous in our model than what those opposed to strong reductions in consumption often assume.
Global Environmental Change, vol.65, November 2020
Should the ecological left aim to reduce all consumption, or to radically transform the prevalent type of consumption?
Presentation [part of the standard session “Limits, Ethics, Unsustainability and Change“]
Critical views of consumerism are widely shared among degrowthers. However, there is a risk of overlooking a particular affective dimension of consumption: the ‘entropic feeling’. The latter is triggered when we surpass the biophysical limits of our human body and come to enjoy the pleasures of dense energy, e.g. when we drive cars or drink coffee. Taking a critical and re-constructive stance towards what we call the ‘awesome life’ might increase the affective and strategic capacity of degrowth.
Presenters: Michael Deflorian (Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, WU Vienna), Karoline Kalke (Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, WU Vienna)
Language: English with German translation
Technical details: Standard A5_Michael DEFLORIAN&Karoline Kalke_The Awesome Life_ Why Degrowthers Need to Talk about the Feeling of Entropy.mp4, MPEG-4 video, 53.5MB
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Conferencia de la Plenaria del Jueves por Ulrich Brand: “Cómo el capitalismo afirma su hegemonía: El modo de vida imperial como promesa de riqueza imposible”
This article investigates the effect of digitalization on energy consumption. Using an analytical model, we investigate four effects: (1) direct effects from the production, usage and disposal of information and communication technologies (ICT), (2) energy efficiency increases from digitalization, (3) economic growth from increases in labor and energy productivities and (4) sectoral change/tertiarization from the rise of ICT services. The analysis combines empirical and theoretical findings from debates on decoupling energy consumption from economic growth and from debates on green IT and ICT for sustainability. Our main results: Effects 1 and 3 tend to increase energy consumption. Effects 2 and 4 tend to decrease it. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that the two increasing effects prevail so that, overall, digitalization increases energy consumption. These results can be explained by four insights from ecological economics: (a) physical capital and energy are complements in the ICT sector, (b) increases in energy efficiency lead to rebound effects, (c) ICT cannot solve the difficulty of decoupling economic growth from exergy, (d) ICT services are relatively energy intensive and come on top of former production. In future, digitalization can only boost sustainability when it fosters effects 2 and 4 without promoting effects 1 and 3.
Ecological Economics, vol. 176, October 2020
Around two-thirds of global GHG emissions are directly and indirectly linked to household consumption, with a global average of about 6 tCO2eq/cap. Changes in consumption patterns to low-carbon alternatives therefore present a great and urgently required potential for emission reductions. In this paper, we synthesize emission mitigation potentials across the consumption domains of food, housing, transport and other consumption. We systematically screened 6,990 records in the Web of Science Core Collections and Scopus. Searches were restricted to 1) reviews of lifecycle assessment studies and 2) multiregional input-output studies of household consumption, published after 2011 in English. We selected against pre-determined eligibility criteria and quantitatively synthesized findings from 53 studies in a meta-review. We identified 771 original options, which we summarized and presented in 61 consumption options with a positive mitigation potential. We used a fixed-effects model to explore the role of contextual factors (geographical, technical and socio-demographic factors) for the outcome variable (mitigation potential per capita) within consumption options. We establish consumption options with a high mitigation potential measured in tons of CO2eq/capita/yr. For transport, the options with the highest mitigation potential include living car-free, shifting to a battery electric vehicle, and reducing flying by a long return flight with a median reduction potential of more than 1.7 tCO2eq/cap. In the context of food, the highest carbon savings come from dietary changes, particularly an adoption of vegan diet with an average and median mitigation potential of 0.9 and 0.8 tCO2eq/cap, respectively. Shifting to renewable electricity and refurbishment and renovation are the options with the highest mitigation potential in the housing domain, with medians at 1.6 and 0.9 tCO2eq/cap, respectively. We find that the top 10 consumption options together yield an average mitigation potential of 9.2 tCO2eq/cap, indicating substantial contributions towards achieving the 1.5-2°C target, particularly in high-income context.
Environmental Research Letters, April 2020
Abstract: Metrics on resource productivity currently used by governments suggest that some developed countries have increased the use of natural resources at a slower rate than economic growth (relative decoupling) or have even managed to use fewer resources over time (absolute decoupling). Using the material footprint (MF), a consumption-based indicator of resource use, we find the contrary: Achievements in decoupling in advanced economies are smaller than reported or even nonexistent. We present a time series analysis of the MF of 186 countries and identify material flows associated with global production and consumption networks in unprecedented specificity. By calculating raw material equivalents of international trade, we demonstrate that countries’ use of nondomestic resources is, on average, about threefold larger than the physical quantity of traded goods. As wealth grows, countries tend to reduce their domestic portion of materials extraction through international trade, whereas the overall mass of material consumption generally increases. With every 10% increase in gross domestic product, the average national MF increases by 6%. Our findings call into question the sole use of current resource productivity indicators in policy making and suggest the necessity of an additional focus on consumption-based accounting for natural resource use.
PNAS, May 2015, 112 (20), pp. 6271-6276
Esta presentación explica los desafíos de un modelo energético sostenible en México (2050).
Socio-environmental issues will continue to emerge if an energy transition project does not include changes in patterns of consumption and resource governance.
In July 2019, the Stay Grounded Network met in Barcelona to discuss how to counter the massive growth in the aviation sector. A new movement for degrowing aviation and fostering climate justice was born. The results of the conference and further discussions fed into this report, outlining numerous measures to reduce air travel in a just way.
(Excerpt)
“As we continue to grapple with climate change, we can expect consumers, rather than politicians, to increasingly drive degrowth by changing their consumption patterns. Firms should think in an innovative way about this consumer-driven degrowth as an opportunity, instead of resisting or dismissing the demands of this small but growing movement. Businesses that successfully do so will emerge more resilient and adaptable — instead of necessarily selling more, they will sell better, and grow in a way that satisfies consumers while respecting the environment.”
Presentation by Madalina Balau
In Romania all parents want to offer their children a better life and a better future, sometimes with their own sacrifice, yet the years following communist regime have brought unsustainable development, present in environmental degradation and social insecurity. After living in communism and knowing how bad it was, people have been accustoming for the last 26 years, to accept the lesser evil, and all critics to current capitalism and democracy are seen as communist nostalgia. I believe Degrowth can open the debate and stop seeing reality in dual terms – evil and good, or evil and less evil – and I try to explore this possibility here. The purpose of this paper is to understand, from parents perspective, the way consumer culture has impacted childhood and produced changes in their children’s lives. This will enable identifying lessons for a good life, from both communist regime and consumer culture childhoods. The study is based on interviews conducted with adults born in Romania during the communist regime, that lived at least some part of their childhood then, and who are now parents. The present findings suggest that parents see their children offered more opportunities of buying products and services, more activities to attend and more wishes to fulfill. This comes at the expense of less time for family and lost connections with the extended family, less freedom to play and less freedom to refuse consuming certain products due to peer pressure. These are identified mainly as a paradox, since in appearance we have more freedom, but time pressure and the lack of financial means to attend certain activities makes this freedom impossible to obtain in individual lives.
