trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

doubling worldwide prosperity, i.e. it would lead to an increase in worldwide resource productivity by afactor of four (von Weizsäcker et al., 1997).According to Bringezu (2009) an acceptable level of total material consumption 1 would be appr. 6tonnes of abiotic materials per capita in a year. In addition, the present consumption of appr. 4 tonnes ofbiotic resources could probably be maintained, whereas erosion should be reduced by a factor of 10 to 15from the present 3 tonnes per capita (Bringezu 2009). Thus, a sustainable level of total materialconsumption would amount to a maximum of 10 tonnes, including household comsumption as well aspublic consumption and capital formation. This means a reduction ba a factor of 3 to 8.5 from thepresent TMC level of Western industrialised countries according to Bringezu et al. (2009) and a factor 5to 6 reduction of the Finnish TMC according to Hoffrén (2010), Bringezu et al. (2009) and Mäenpää(2005).Concern about unsustainable development of private consumption has raised its head during thepast few decades in the western countries. Household consumption has grown tremendously: theconsumption expenditure in the EU-15 increased by almost one third per person between 1990 and2002. At the same time households are becoming smaller and are tending to use more energy and water,in addition to generating more waste per person (European Environment Agency, 2005). By the year2030 the world GDP is expected to grow by 130%, which means that the extraction of natural rawmaterials would increase by 50%, despite an expected improvement in efficiency (Meyer, 2009).The FIN-MIPS Households research project has calculated the material footprint of 27 Finnishhouseholds in an explorative setting. The average material footprint of the households studied was 39tonnes per person in a year, which is very close to the 40 tonnes of an average Finn (Kotakorpi et al.,2008). Thus, an average Finnish household would have to achieve a reduction by a factor of 5 to 8 inorder to achieve the sustainable level of natural resource consumption sketched above on the basis ofBringezu (2009), depending the level of resource consumption from public consumption and capitalformation that could be considered sustainable.3. Methods3.1. Reference budgetsThe National Consumer Research Centre (NCRC) compiled the decent minimum reference budgets (Lehtinenet al., 2011) as part of the comprehensive research project ‘Back to basics: Basic security and consumption’ 2 . Thedecent minimum reference budgets were produced for four types of households: a young single person, anelderly single person, a middle-aged couple, and a couple with two children (Lehtinen et al., 2011).In the NCRC’s project, groups of consumers, experts, and researchers were involved. Discussionsabout commodities were conducted with the consumers (n=53) but the commodities included in the1Total material consumption (TMC) means the consumption-based material consumption of an economy, i.e. thetotal material requirement (TMR) of an economy minus the export-based resource use. Both TMC and TMR includethe consumption of abiotic and biotic resoruces as well as erosion in agriculture and forestry.2This projects examines the level of Finnish basic security from various perspectives and is performed by the SocialInsurance Institution of Finland, Kela, the National Consumer Research Centre, Helsinki University, and theNational Institute for Health and Welfare.205