Talk on sustainable consumption and production in the context of the climate crisis . Part of the lecture on Global climate change given at Webster University , Vienna.

1. Sustainable consumption & production
Who is responsible? The impact of individual choices
• Understanding human nature interaction
• Reflection on our consumption diaries
• Introduction to basic concepts of sustainability science. carbon foot
printing and life cycle assessments
• Sustainability & the economy – views from the practice
• Labels
• Greenwashing
• Supply chains: Palm oil, Orange Juice, Cacao

2. Global carbon budget
Carbon emissions are partitioned among the atmosphere and carbon sinks on land and in the ocean
The “imbalance” between total emissions and total sinks reflects the gap in our understanding
Source: CDIAC; NOAA-ESRL; Houghton and Nassikas 2017; Hansis et al 2015; Joos et al 2013;
Khatiwala et al. 2013; DeVries 2014; Le Quéré et al 2018; Global Carbon Budget 2018

3. Historical cumulative fossil CO2 emissions by country
Cumulative fossil CO2 emissions were distributed (1870–2017):
USA 25%, EU28 22%, China 13%, Russia 7%, Japan 4% and India 3%
Cumulative emissions (1990–2017) were distributed China 20%, USA 20%, EU28 14%, Russia 6%, India 5%, Japan 4%
‘All others’ includes all other countries along with bunker fuels and statistical differences
Source: CDIAC; Le Quéré et al 2018; Global Carbon Budget 2018

4. What are the options?

5. Emissions must decline rapidly
CO2 emissions need to rapidly decline to follow pathways consistent with the Paris targets
(Projection for 2018 emissions in red)
Source: Huppmann et al 2018; IAMC 1.5C Scenario Database; IPCC SR15; Jackson et al 2018; Global Carbon Budget 2018

6. Models & Scenarios

7. Understanding Society and Nature interactions

8. How do we relate to nature as humans…?

9. The two concepts of social
metabolism and the
colonization of natural
systems constitute the core
of our socio-ecological
theory. These concepts draw
from quite differing scientific
traditions – biology,
sociology, economics,
technical sciences, history,
geography and cultural
anthropology – and offer a
coherent perspective on the
society-nature relationship.

10. • Socio-economic systems depend on a continuous throughput of materials and energy for their
reproduction and maintenance.
• This dependency can be seen as a functional equivalent of biological metabolism, the organism’s
dependency on material and energy flows.
• We therefore address the concept of a “social metabolism”.
• Contrary to the biological notion, however, this socio-ecological concept links materials and energy flows to
social organisation, recognizing that the quantity of economic resource use, the material composition and
the sources and sinks of the output flows are a function of socio-economic production and consumption
systems that are highly variable across time and space.

13. Scoial-Ecological Systems
"Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework“ is build on concepts &
work of Elenore Ostrom, within which much of the still-evolving theory
of common-pool resources and collective self-governance is now
located.
It also draws heavily on systems ecology and complexity theory.
The studies of SES include some central societal concerns (e.g. equity
and human wellbeing) that have traditionally received little attention in
complex adaptive systems theory, and there are areas of complexity
theory that have little direct relevance for understanding SES.[

14. Fig. 1. General framework for analyzing
sustainability in social-ecological systems
(SESs). This study adapts Ostrom’s framework.
Under this framework, different subsystems
are identified: the biophysical system with
capacity to supply ecosystem services (i.e.,
freshwater flows and biodiversity that underlie
the supply of ecosystem services in semiarid
watersheds), the supplied ecosystem services,
the system’s users (i.e., the beneficiaries who
generate ecosystem service demand), and the
governance system (i.e. local water
governance), which are all jointly affected by
different drivers of change (i.e., land-use
intensification). Gray arrows with two
arrowheads represent the interaction between
the different subsystems in terms of
interdependencies and trade-offs..

15. Resilience – a central concept of SES

16. Resilience – a central concept of SES

17. SES & Sustainability
The concept of social-ecological systems has been developed in order
to provide both a promising scientific gain as well as impact on
problems of sustainable development.
The research on social-ecological systems almost always uses
transdisciplinary mode of operation in order to achieve an adequate
problem orientation and to ensure integrative results.
Problems of sustainable development are intrinsically tied to the social-
ecological system defined to tackle them. This means that scientists
from the relevant scientific disciplines or field of research as well as the
involved societal stakeholders have to be regarded as elements of the
social-ecological system in question.

18. What is consumption & what's its impact?

19. Assignment
For Session 5:
Obligatory:
• The Story of Stuff – Youtube Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM
• Task:
1.) Pick five items out of your consumption diary and rank them according to
their environmental impact. Be able to explain how you made your choice.
2.) Find examples for greenwashing (adverts ect.)

20. How can we reach sustainable consumption?
• What are the challenges to make sustainable
consumption easier / mainstream?
• How can we reach sustainable consumption – as
individual / as business / as society?
• How would sustainable consumption feel like?

21. For the final assignment:
• Two weeks of consumption diary
• Analysis:
• Group your consumed items in meaningful categories
• Make a ranking in terms of impacts on climate (very high -high impact – medium
impact – low impact – positive impact)
Justify your ranking, use references
• According to your consumption patterns develop strategies / suggestions to reduce
impact of consumption – by doing so take into account:
• the individual / consumer level,
• Target group, how to implement / communicate
• business / industry level,
• Opportunities, necessary changes
• policy level
• 2-3 concrete policy ideas
2-5 Pages of analysis

23. ...what if every second washmachine in Austria would be
repaired instead of being replace with a new one?
• We would save 37.5000 tons CO2 eq each year ( = total emissions of
5000 Austrians)

24. ...what if only half of the clothing would be bought in
Austria?
• We would save 1,85 Mio. tons CO2eq each year ( = total emissons of
200 000 Austrians)

25. ...what if we would generally swap or buy more second hand in
Austria?
• Eine Onlineplattform wie z.B. www.willhaben.at spart durch die
Vermittlung von Gebrauchtwaren rund 192.000 Tonnen CO2eq (laut
Studie der Denkstatt für Willhaben).
• Das entspricht den Treibhausgasemissionen von rund 21.300
ÖsterreicherInnen und somit einer Stadt in der Größe von Mödling.

26. Impact of products and Services
Life Cycle Thinking

27. Tools
• Life Cycle Thinking
View on the whole live cycle of products or services
• Life Cycle Assessments -> LCA, Social-LCA, LCA-costing…
• ISO 14040

28. Important aspects of LCAs
Goal and scope
An LCA starts with an explicit
statement of the goal and scope of
the study, which sets out the
context of the study and explains
how and to whom the results are
to be communicated. This is a key
step and the ISO standards require
that the goal and scope of an LCA
be clearly defined and consistent
with the intended application. The
goal and scope document,
therefore, includes technical
details that guide subsequent
work

29. Important aspects of LCAs
Life cycle inventory
Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) analysis
involves creating an inventory of
flows from and to nature for a
product system.
Inventory flows include inputs of
water, energy, and raw materials,
and releases to air, land, and water.
To develop the inventory, a flow
model of the technical system is
constructed using data on inputs
and outputs.

30. Important aspects of LCAs
The Impact Assessment phase of LCA is aimed at
evaluating the significance of potential environmental
impacts based on the LCI flow results. Classical life cycle
impact assessment (LCIA) consists of the following
mandatory elements:
• selection of impact categories, category indicators,
and characterization models;
• the classification stage, where the inventory
parameters are sorted and assigned to specific impact
categories; and
• impact measurement, where the categorized LCI flows
are characterized, using one of many possible LCIA
methodologies, into common equivalence units that
are then summed to provide an overall impact
category total.

31. Important aspects of LCAs
Life Cycle Interpretation is a systematic technique to
identify, quantify, check, and evaluate information from
the results of the life cycle inventory and/or the life cycle
impact assessment. The results from the inventory
analysis and impact assessment are summarized during
the interpretation phase. The outcome of the
interpretation phase is a set of conclusions and
recommendations for the study. According to ISO
14040:2006, the interpretation should include:
•identification of significant issues based on the
results of the LCI and LCIA phases of an LCA;
•evaluation of the study considering completeness,
sensitivity and consistency checks; and
•conclusions, limitations and recommendations.

33. 30%

35. Der GLOBAL 2000 GÜTESIEGEL CHECK www.global2000.at
Labels and sustainable production
Ansonsten:
-Weniger Fleisch essen
-Obst und Gemüse nur wenn
es Saison hat.
Wo (gute) Gütesiegel
besonders wichtig sind
-Produkte aus dem Globalen
Süden
-Tierische Produkte

36. Der GLOBAL 2000 GÜTESIEGEL CHECK
DIE ÖSTERREICHISCHE UMELTSCHUTZORGANISATION
www.global2000.at
Labels and sustainable production:
Example of MSC

37. Der GLOBAL 2000 GÜTESIEGEL CHECK www.global2000.at
Labels and sustainable production:
Example of MSC

38. Greenwashing

39. An average citizen in Germany will be exposed to between 2.500
und 10.000 adverts per day

40. https://www.adbusters.org

41. In times of increasing
environmental
concerns…

42. …more and more
businesses try to
appear green

43. Ok, but what actually is greenwashing?

44. The EU Definition of environmental claims
The expressions "environmental claims" or "green claims" refer to the practice of
suggesting or otherwise creating the impression (in the context of a commercial
communication, marketing or advertising) that a product or a service, is
environmentally friendly (i.e. it has a positive impact on the environment) or is
less damaging to the environment than competing goods or services.
This may be due to, for example, its composition, the way it has been
manufactured or produced, the way it can be disposed of and the reduction in
energy or pollution which can be expected from its use.
When such claims are not true or cannot be verified this practice can be
described as 'greenwashing'.
(https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/compliance_criteria_2016_en.pdf)

46. A national press ad, for Shell, was headlined
"DON'T THROW ANYTHING AWAY THERE
IS NO AWAY"
The ASA (Advertising Standards Authority – UK)
noted Shell used some of its waste CO2 to
grow flowers and that this had environmental
benefits. However, the ASA considered that,
in the absence of qualification, most readers
were likely to interpret the claim "We use our
waste CO2 to grow flowers", especially in the
context of the image and the headline claim
"Don't throw anything away there is no away",
to mean that Shell used all, or at least the
majority, of their waste CO2 to grow
flowers, whereas the actual amount was a
very small proportion. The ASA concluded
that the claim was likely to mislead.

47. The ASA noted the "Eco2" and "eco-logical" logos, as well as the
image of leaves from the exhaust of the car, were intended to
highlight that the Twingo met the criteria set out in Renaults Eco2
scheme. The ASA noted Renault had established three criteria
that had to be met under the scheme and that included CO2
emissions of 140 g/km or less.
The ASA noted, however, that the Twingo was in band C of the
Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) rankings for emissions and that it did
not feature in the Department for Transports selection of top
ten low CO2 cars. The ASA considered that, without
qualification about the nature of the Eco2 scheme and the criteria
involved, consumers were likely to understand from the ad that
the Twingo caused relatively little harm to the environment and
had low emissions compared with other similar cars. The ASA
noted the ad included information about the CO2 emissions of
the car but it considered that this was insufficient to justify the
overall impression created by the ad, in particular the image of
leaves coming out of the exhaust and the "eco-logical" claim.
Because Renault had not explained the basis of the "Eco2" logo and
because the image of leaves coming out of the exhaust and the
"eco-logical" claim implied that the car was more environmentally
friendly than it was, the ASA concluded that the ad exaggerated
the environmental benefits of the Twingo and was therefore likely
to mislead.

48. A poster for an airline featured an image of
an Airbus flying over the Finnish
coastline.
The ASA considered that readers were
likely to interpret the claim eco-smart,
without qualification, as a claim
analogous to environmentally friendly
which conveyed the impression that flying
with Finnair would have little or no
detrimental effect on the environment.
Because this was not the case, the ASA
concluded the claim was likely to mislead.

49. "High performance. Low
emissions. Zero guilt." That was
the claim made in a Lexus ad
campaign. However, the
Advertising Standards Authority
didn't agree, and has banned the
advert on the grounds of false
claims.
Although the ASA agreed that, for
an SUV, the car had low emissions.
However the headline was
misleading because it implied,
incorrectly, that the car caused little
or no harm to the environment.

50. "Soft, sensual and sustainable, it's
Cotton USA!". Ads by Cotton USA, a
marketing association for US grown
cotton, have come under fire in the UK.
The Advertising Standards Authority
(ASA) received three complaints
challenging the term "sustainable",
arguing that cotton is a "pesticide-
and insecticide-intensive crop" that
could "seriously deplete"
groundwater supplies where it is
grown in the US. The cotton peddlers
said that American cotton met
"reasonable and generally accepted"
definitions of sustainability, calling
their cotton "natural, renewable,
biodegradable and sustainable fibre."

51. Ad busting

53. …and the DIY-version

54. Food supply chains
Many
farmers
Local
traders First processing & global
raw material trade
RetailProducers
Many consumers
Concentration
process
Little power if not
organised
Little power if not
organised
Power
But no
responsibility?
5 retailers control 70%
of EU market
Gatekeeper in supply chains – link
between producers and
consumers
For globally traded materials Retail has a huge influence
on production and
consumption behaviour