Towards sustainable production and use of resources:

Assessing the environmental impacts of consumption and production: Priority Products and Materials

Global economic activity drives high levels of consumption and production. In order to maintain consumption and production activities, the global economy relies upon resources such as energy, materials and land. Economic activity also generates material residuals, which enter the environment as waste or pollution emissions. The Earth, being a finite planet, has a limited capability to supply resources and to absorb pollution.

A fundamental question faced by governments worldwide is how different economic activities influence the use of natural resources and the generation of pollution. The International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management (Resource Panel) is responding to this challenge with its assessment report: Assessing the environmental impacts of consumption and production: priority products and materials.

The focus is on which key environmental and resource pressures need to be considered in the assessment of products and materials. It takes a global perspective, recognizing regional and local differences.

UNEP's Resource Panel launches assessment report on the impacts of consumption and production

Background

The International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management was established to provide independent, coherent and authoritative scientific assessments of policy relevance on the sustainable use of natural resources and in particular their environmental impacts over the full life cycle. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of how to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation. The report Assessing the environmental impacts of consumption and production: priority products and material is part of a series of reports on a variety of topics.

Scope

This report addresses this fundamental question in two main steps. First, a review of the work that assesses the importance of observed pressures and impacts on the Earth's Natural system (usually divided into ecological health, human health, and resources provision capability). Second, the report investigates the causation of these pressures by different economic activities, which is done via three main perspectives:

Industrial production, which production processes contribute most to pressures and impacts? This perspective is relevant for informing producers and sustainability policies focusing on production.

A final consumption perspective, which products and consumption categories have the greatest impacts across their life cycle? This perspective is relevant for informing consumers and sustainability policies focusing on products and consumption.

A material use perspective, which materials have the greatest impacts across their life cycle? This perspective is relevant for material choices and sustainability policies focusing on materials and resources.

The assessment was based on a broad review and comparison of existing studies and literature analyzing impacts of production, consumption, or resource use of countries, country groups, or the world as a whole. The report reviews assessments of environmental impacts in order to identify environmental pressures that should be considered when assessing priority products and materials and also reviews work on scarcity of mineral, fossil and biotic resources.

Key findings of the assessment report

A wealth of studies are available that helped to assess the most important causes of environmental impacts from a production, consumption and materials perspective. These different studies, and different perspectives points, paint a consistent overall picture.

• Agriculture and food consumption are identified as one of the most important drivers of environmental pressures, especially habitat change, climate change, water use and toxic emissions.
  
  
• The use of fossil energy carriers for heating, transportation, metal refining and the production of manufactured goods is of comparable importance, causing the depletion of fossil energy resources, climate change, and a wide range of emissions-related impacts.
  
  
• The impacts related to these activities are unlikely to be reduced, but rather enhanced, in a business as usual scenario. This study showed that CO2 emissions are highly correlated with income. Population and economic growth will hence lead to higher impacts, unless patterns of production and consumption can be changed.
  
  
• Furthermore, there are certain interlinkages between problems that may aggravate them in the future. For example, many proposed sustainable technologies for energy supply and mobility rely for a large part on the use of metals (e.g. in batteries, fuel cells and solar cells). Metal refining usually is energy intensive. The production of such novel infrastructure may hence be energy-intensive, and create scarcity of certain materials, issues not yet investigated sufficiently. There is hence a need for analysis to evaluate trends, develop scenarios and identify sometimes complicated trade-offs.
  

Consumption and Production report launch event

13.00, Wednesday, 2 June, 2010 at the European Commission, Brussels, Belgium

UNEP Deputy Executive Director Angela Cropper will join European Commissioner for the Environment, Janez Potocnik, to the launch of the assessment report together with the Hon. Prof. Mark Mwandosya, Minister for Water and Irrigation of Tanzania, Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Co-Chair of the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, and Edgar Hertwich, the Lead Author of the report.

  

Environmental impacts of consumption and production report: priority products and resources

Press release

Summary (English, French, Spanish)

Full report

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Presentation