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

Información del proyecto

MaSES

Identificador del acuerdo de subvención: 101087573

DOI

10.3030/101087573

Fecha de la firma de la CE 7 Abril 2023

Fecha de inicio 1 Mayo 2023

Fecha de finalización 30 Abril 2028

Financiado con arreglo a

• European Research Council (ERC)

Coste total

€ 1 981 765,00

Aportación de la UE

€ 1 981 765,00

Coordinado por

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)

Período documentado: 2023-05-01 hasta 2025-10-31

Resumen del contexto y de los objetivos generales del proyecto

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.

Trabajo realizado desde el comienzo del proyecto hasta el final del período abarcado por el informe y los principales resultados hasta la fecha

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).

Avances que van más allá del estado de la técnica e impacto potencial esperado (incluida la repercusión socioeconómica y las implicaciones sociales más amplias del proyecto hasta la fecha)

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.