More or Better? A Model for Changes in Household Greenhouse Gas Emissions due to Higher Income

Abstract

Households exert an important influence on total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, their consumption behavior is of interest in evaluations of climate policy options and projections of future emission paths. While most evaluations of household consumption and its emissions are based on expenditure only, we use a household consumption model based on functional units (e.g., kg food, person kilometers, living square meters). The goal of this article is to assess changes in consumption with increasing affluence level of households and to compare the allocation of GHG emissions to monetary versus functional units. We find that (1) the model based on functional units provides good bottom-up estimates for greenhouse emissions of Swiss households; (2) quality (price per functional unit) increases with income for many consumption categories, and therefore using functional instead of monetary units leads to a lower increase of greenhouse gas emissions with income; (3) the relevance of GHG emissions from goods and mobility will increase. We conclude that using household models based on monetary units only overestimates the impact of marginal consumption and neglects the potential of decoupling income and environmental impact by consuming better instead of more. For sustainable consumption, research and policy should aim at preventing goods of higher quality from having higher environmental impact in order to benefit from the increasing quality orientation with rising income.

Global inequities and emissions in Western European textiles and clothing consumption

“…One way to bring together a reduction in consumption in affluent nations and increased wages in poorer nations is the "better rather than more" strategy (Clift et al, 2013;Girod and De Haan, 2010) which advocates a reduction in the volume of consumption by purchasing "better" products at a higher price. The difficulty with such a strategy lies in defining what it means for a product to be "better".…”

The Distribution of Material Footprints in Germany

“…Assuming a constant material-intensity for goods of different quality overestimates material footprints if high-quality goods are produced with more labour rather than more material inputs. Using functional units (kg of rice, number of dishwashers) instead of expenditure, Girod and De Haan (2010) find that Swiss households' expenditure elasticity of greenhouse gas emissions, the percentage change of greenhouse gas emissions in response to a one per cent increase in expenditure, declines from 1.06 to 0.53. Furthermore, the material footprints of similar goods can vary substantially (Cederberg and Mattsson, 2000).…”

“…We employ the EASI demand 2 Utilising between-country heterogeneity, studies find affluence, measured as income or final demand, to be the principle driver of material footprints (Wiedmann et al, 2015;Pothen, 2017;Pothen and Welsch, 2017) 3 The energy footprint of households, also known as energy requirements, has been estimated since the 1970s (Herendeen and Tanaka, 1976;Herendeen, 1978). Other studies on energy and carbon footprints of households include Wier et al (2001) for Denmark, Weber and Matthews (2008) for the USA, Druckman and Jackson (2009) and Baiocchi et al (2010) for the UK, Girod and De Haan (2010) for Switzerland, Steen-Olsen et al (2016) for Norway, and Lenzen et al (2006) for Australia, Brazil, Denmark, India as well as Japan. Hertwich (2005) provides an overview.…”

Raw Material Equivalents: The Challenges of Accounting for Sustainability in a Globalized World

“…If a high-price version of a product is offered for domestic final demand and the same product is exported in a low-price version, the RME of domestic final demand will appear to be higher even though the required material inputs may not increase proportionally to the price. The indicator may therefore not be able to fully reflect the (potentially resource-saving) impact of the consumption of higher-cost products made with lower inputs [83]. This would be the case if more expensive carbon-labeled products (with lower fossil energy inputs) were produced for domestic final consumption and non-carbon-labeled, less expensive versions of the same product were produced for export.…”