[MCN] Muddling toward "truly sustainable consumption": 4 key areas

[Lance Olsen]

Annual Review of Environment and Resources  DOI: 
10.1146/annurev-environ-102014-021224

Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of 
Environment and Resources Volume 40 is October 17, 2015. Please see 
http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised 
estimates.

Transforming Consumption: From Decoupling, to Behavior Change, to 
System Changes for Sustainable Consumption

Dara O'Rourke, Niklas Lollo

Abstract
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-environ-102014-021224

Consumption, although often considered an individual choice, is 
deeply ingrained in behaviors, cultures, and institutions, and is 
driven and supported by corporate and government practices. 
Consumption is also at the heart of many of our most critical 
ecological, health, and social problems. What is referred to broadly 
as sustainable consumption has primarily focused on making 
consumption more efficient and gradually decoupling it from energy 
and resource use. We argue for the need to focus sustainable 
consumption initiatives on the key impact areas of 
consumption-transport, housing, energy use, and food-and at deeper 
levels of system change. To meet the scale of the sustainability 
challenges we face, interventions and policies must move from 
relative decoupling via technological improvements, to strategies to 
change the behavior of individual consumers, to broader initiatives 
to change systems of production and consumption. We seek to connect 
these emerging literatures on behavior change, structural 
interventions, and sustainability transitions to arrive at integrated 
frameworks for learning, iteration, and scaling of sustainability 
innovations. We sketch the outlines of research and practice that 
offer potentials for system changes for truly sustainable consumption.
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"Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to 
the causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes 
they perceive."

Attributed  to Thomas Hobbes
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"Making connections is the essence of scientific progress."

Chris Quigg, "Aesthetic Science,"
Scientific American, April 1999
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"Although we are only at an early stage in the projected trends of 
global warming, ecological responses to recent climate change are 
already clearly visible."

Walther et al, "Ecological responses to recent climate change."
Nature, March 28, 2002



















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