Today on 8th April, 500 leading researchers gather in Lund for the world’s largest conference on sustainable consumption research, SCORAI 2025.
The conference is an excellent opportunity to remind of these scientists’ single most important recommendation: within the research community, there is currently a growing consensus that our consumption must not only be greener, our total consumption levels must decrease.
Research findings from research projects including Mistra Sustainable Consumption and EU 1.5° Lifestyles point to that to three different strategies for sustainable consumption:
- Efficiency - make products and process more sustainable through i.e technological innovations
- Shift - replace resource intensive products with more climate friendly alternative products
- Reduce - consume less. This can be done through reduced car and air travel, less shopping, and sharing of resources. This is called sufficiency, that is consumption according to need, not based on continuously growing desire for over-consumption.
It is obvious that the need to decrease consumption levels is the dominating theme in the SCORAI conference. Now that there is such a clear concert within the research community, let’s hope that our policy-makers listen to these insights!
