Key drivers for unsustainable resource use – categories, effects and policy pointers

Abstract

Prevailing resource use patterns of the global socio-industrial metabolism are unsustainable. An increasing number of people globally require ever more materials (including energy carriers), land and water for rising living standards and lifestyles converging towards western, industrialised patterns. Therefore, these resources will continue becoming both scarcer and depleted, while environmental impacts associated with their consumption, e.g. run-away climate change, will continue to rise. For effective resource policies, drivers for such unsustainable resource use and their effects need to be better understood and mapped.By means of meta-analysis of more than 60 sources of relevant literature, we identified a set of ten driver categories that affect unsustainable resource use, inter alia prevailing consumption and production patterns, use and design of infrastructure and technology, underlying paradigms and world views, resource prices and the level of knowledge and information of resource users. Cumulative effects of the drivers contribute, for instance, up to 30% of phosphorus loss from soil and around 30% of building energy loss globally. Although the data does not allow clear-cut causal attribution of effects, it enables the distinction between direct and indirect drivers.In relation to a multi-dimensional network of drivers causing unsustainable resource use, resource policy should combine policy objectives and instruments into policy mixes to target key drivers and their interrelations. While policy mixes need to respond to context specific driver settings, targeting consumer behaviour emerges as a general driver focus of policy mixes. Combining different instrument types and implementing them in a time-dynamic sequence can mitigate trade-offs between different instruments and in the longer-term increase feasibility of profound behaviour changes.