Assessing the decoupling of economic growth from environmental impacts in the European Union: A consumption-based approach

Abstract

Pursuing a responsible and sustainable development, the United Nations urged to decouple economic growth from environmental impacts. Several European Union (EU) policies have been implemented towards such goal. Although multiple authors have evaluated the decoupling of the economic growth from the resource use or environmental concerns, the environmental assessment mostly focused on pressures rather than impacts, and used single indicators assumed to be a proxy of the overall effects on the environment. Furthermore, no studies were found using a process-based life cycle approach to quantify the environmental impacts of consumption. To solve such research gap, this paper assesses the decoupling in the EU focusing on potential environmental impacts, complementing a production-based approach with two options for accounting for the impacts of consumption. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the decoupling of the economic growth (in terms of Gross Domestic Product) from the environmental impacts due to EU-28 consumption, assessed by means of life cycle assessment (LCA). The decoupling is then assessed in impact terms rather than limited to pressures by using the Environmental Footprint (EF2017) indicators, which allows assessing 16 different impacts. The Consumption Footprint indicator quantified the environmental impacts of EU apparent consumption, including the territorial impacts (Domestic Footprint) and the embodied impacts in both imports and exports (Trade Footprint). The inventory of pressures for the trade component is compiled either with a bottom-up approach (process-based LCA of representative traded goods) or a top-down approach (input-output-based LCA). Methodological aspects influencing the decoupling assessment and the resulting outputs are presented and discussed. According to the results, the environmental impacts of EU-28 consumption showed decoupling during the last decades (2005–2014), between relative to absolute decoupling depending on the inventory modeling approach taken. Some countries showed higher decoupling levels than others displaying a heterogeneous map of EU-28 decoupling, which was led by acidification, particulate matter, land use and eutrophication impacts. Notwithstanding current limitations, the assessment of decoupling using consumption-based environmental indicators is very promising for supporting policy-making towards addressing the actual impacts driven by the EU production and consumption system.

Environmental sustainability of European production and consumption assessed against planetary boundaries

“…A set of LCA-based indicators was developed to monitor the progress towards decoupling economic growth from resource use and associated environmental impacts of EU production and consumption ( Sala et al, 2019a ; Sanyé-Mengual et al, 2019 ). The set of indicators included both territorial and consumption perspectives, employing either process-based LCA or input-output-based LCA and covering either final consumption or household consumption only.…”

Coupling coordination between environment, economy and tourism: A case study of China

“…The relationship between ecology and economy has been the research hotspot of many scholars. Many theories and models have been proposed, such as environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) [7][8][9], coordinated development theory [10], economic-energy-environmental impact model [11], decoupling theory [12][13][14] and coupling model [15]. With the rapid development of tourism, some scholars have begun to explore the relationship between tourism, the environment and the economy, such as the relationship between tourism and ecological environment [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23], the relationship between economic development and tourism [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], and interactive relationship between the environment, economy and tourism [32][33][34][35][36].…”

Unmasking social distant damage of developed regions’ lifestyle: A decoupling analysis of the indecent labour footprint

“…In the words of the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), the concept can be summarised as "breaking the link between environmental bads and economic goods" [24]. While decoupling analysis has blossomed in the environmental sphere (see for instance the recent examples of [25] for the Eropean Union and [26] for a comparison between United States and China), the social dimension has received less attention despite the negative impacts of indecent work are a current issue inside the international agenda. The decoupling analysis of the transport sector fatalities of [27] is one exception that proves the need for additional research.…”