Mainstreaming Social-Ecological Sufficiency: Closing the sustainable consumption gap between societal demand and ecological limits

Project Information

MaSES

Grant agreement ID: 101087573

DOI

10.3030/101087573

EC signature date 7 April 2023

Start date 1 May 2023

End date 30 April 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 981 765,00

EU contribution

€ 1 981 765,00

Coordinated by

LEUPHANA UNIVERSITAT LUNEBURG
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MaSES (Mainstreaming Social-Ecological Sufficiency: Closing the sustainable consumption gap between societal demand and ecological limits)

Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2025-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The overall aim of MaSES is to mainstream the notion of social-ecological sufficiency as a conceptual and empirical bridge between research on planetary boundaries and sustainable production and consumption, with far-reaching academic and societal implications for sustainable resource use. WP1 will synthesize disparate approaches to conceptualizing sufficiency and cement social-ecological sufficiency as a core idea in sustainability thinking. WP2 will employ a global environmentally extended material and energy flow analysis to quantify key planetary boundaries (land-system change, biochemical flows, climate change and freshwater use) in terms of ‘ecologically sufficient’ levels of household consumption. WP3 will adapt methods from consensual deprivation assessments to identify ‘socially sufficient’ levels of household consumption across different social groups. WP4 will assess the feasibility of different strategies for closing the gap between ecologically ‘safe’ and socially ‘acceptable’ levels of household consumption. WP5 addresses project management.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Conceptualising sufficiency: A revised version of a theoretical paper setting out how the project conceptualises social-ecological sufficiency is in preparation. Here a focus has been placed on the resolution of ‘characteristic tensions in sufficiency thinking (e.g. the tension between sufficiency as a means or an end; as determined by the individual, or collectively; as a single determinable point, or as existing within some upper and lower limits. This framework has also been used in several setting (e.g. a special workshop session at the SCORAI conference on sustainable production and consumption) to map how academics working on sufficiency position themselves with regards to those tensions. This has led to an online survey tool that we are currently in the process of finalising to map more broadly how academia understands the notion of sufficiency.

Estimating ecologically sufficient levels of household consumption: Considerable work has been undertaken to prepare secondary environmentally extended input output data to make it possible to map ecologically sufficient levels of household consumption to four planetary boundaries (water, climate, land use and biochemical flow). This has included ensuring that the databases are compatible with household survey data, our own representative survey deciding on how to downscale planetary boundaries and how to distinguish between household and non-household consumption. A review paper on the methods available for such work is published (Godoy Leon et al 2025 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2025.04.015) and several other papers are currently in preparation. In order to increase the spatial resolution of this analysis we have decided to combine the EXIOBASE and REX databases, which requires additional data cleaning, adjustment and synchronisation.

Qualifying social sufficiency at the household level: Considerable work has gone into developing a representative survey quantify German households’ notions of sufficient consumption across multiple different consumption categories. The survey will be carried out (n = approximately 2000 households) in October 2025. The development of the survey was in part based on detailed qualitative interview undertaken throughout 2024 andnsiderable work has been undertaken to ensure the survey is both understandable for normal household to answer, while remaining compatible with the modelling approaches to quantify ecological sufficiency (via planetary boundaries).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

We consider the shift from top-down, imposed understanding of what constitutes sufficient levels of consumption, towards bottom-up, consensual elicitations of what constitutes sufficient levels of consumption to be genuinely novel and beyond state-of-the-art, particularly with regard to the current research on modelling/assessing sustainable consumption at the global level as typified in the research on Just and Safe Operating Spaces for Humanity.
We also consider the attempt to elicit a detailed, statistically representative, understanding of what constitutes societal (Germany) across all major categories of consumption and in a manner that allows us to model the environmental pressures that would result from such desired levels of consumption to go beyond the current state-of-the-art with regard to sufficiency modelling.