Quantifying environmental impacts of consumption: Implications for governance

Chapter 4 ‘Quantifying environmental impacts of consumption: Implications for governance’ by Arnold Tukker addresses a requirement for sustainable consumption governance - a clear understanding of how consumption of specific categories of goods and services in specific countries causes environmental impacts in global value chains. One of the main challenges for analysing the impacts of consumption is associated with the state and features of assessment methods. This chapter first offers a comprehensive analysis of extant methods for assessing consumption impacts and then proceeds to identify and discuss the priority consumption areas of households: food, housing and individual mobility, and their subgroups. Determining variables for the environmental footprints of household consumption are then identified where income, the numbers of dwellers per household, house size and the electricity mix are among the most important explanatory variables of the impacts of household consumption. Suggestions for future research include measures for improved monitoring of how consumption drives environmental impacts.