TY  - JOUR
A1  - Spangenberg, J. H.
A1  - Lorek, S.
T1  - Indicators for environmentally sustainable household consumption
JF  - Int. J. Sustainable Development
N2  - The objective of this paper is to identify those areas of consumption, in which private households can make significant contributions to environmental sustainability, and to present a transparent and comprehensive set of indicators for them. The analysis of the environmental impacts of households focuses on consumption clusters that permit to depict different life spheres of private households. Two criteria guided the investigation of the relevance of these clusters: · The significance of the consumption cluster, and · The potential influence of households. Resource consumption was chosen as simplified, but reliable representation of environmental pressure dynamics. Growing resource consumption goes together with growing environmental pressures and vice versa, although not necessarily proportionally. The key resources analysed are energy and material consumption, and land use. Based on this analysis, three priority fields for action by households were identified: construction and housing, food/nutrition and transport (in this order). All other consumption clusters can be considered environmentally marginal, providing combined saving potentials of less than 10% of the total resource consumption. Finally, from description of the respective roles of actors based on anecdotal evidence a semi-quantitative "actor matrix" is presented indicating the relative influence of different actors per consumption cluster.
KW  - Sustainability
KW  - Indicators
KW  - Key resources
KW  - Actors centred approach
KW  - Material Flows
Y1  - 2001
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:836-opus-7764
SN  - 0960-1406
VL  - 4
SP  - 101
EP  - 120
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Spangenberg, J. H.
A1  - Lorek, S.
T1  - Environmentally sustainable household consumption: from aggregate environmental pressures to priority fields of action
JF  - Ecological Economics
N2  - Unsustainable consumption patterns of the North (or rather of the global affluent consumers class) have been identified by Agenda 21 as one of the key driving forces behind the unsustainable development. However, neither accounting based on the system of national accounts SNA nor household economics provide the proper instruments to assess the environmental impact of household decision making. Eco-efficiency assessments as familiar in the business sector provide no appropriate tool for households. As an alternative an environmental space based assessment scheme is suggested covering the major pressures on the environment caused by household decisions. The methodology is used twice: once to analyse the environmental relevance of the main activity clusters of household consumption and once to identify the dominant acts of consumption within each cluster. The latter provide the basis for deriving environmental performance indicators. A rough analysis of household influence potentials permits to identify housing, eating and mobility as the three priority fields for action for minimising the environmental impact of households. Extending the influence analysis actor matrixes are derived allocating influence and thus responsibility for environmental pressures to different groups of economic agents.
KW  - Sustainable consumption
KW  - Consumption clusters
KW  - Environmental space
KW  - Indicators
KW  - Land use
Y1  - 2002
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:836-opus-7775
VL  - 43
IS  - 2-3
SP  - 127
EP  - 140
ER  -