Environmental impacts of the consumption of EU and EU countries

The Consumption Footprint has been designed aiming at supporting policy-making in:

• Identifying environmental hotspots: the granularity of the indicators can provide information at different levels (environmental issues with the highest relevance, areas of consumption, product groups and products, life cycle stages of products, and of most relevant resource used or emissions to the environment). The indicators could be presented as 16 different environmental impact categories or as a single score. Biodiversity footprint could be presented as well.
• Monitoring: yearly updates of the indicators allow tracking the evolution of impacts associated with changes in production and consumption patterns. This may be strategic for monitoring e.g. how much EU is decoupling environmental impacts from economic growth, the benefits of transition towards circular economy, the ability of EU to remain within planetary boundaries as well as progress related to the SDGs (especially SDG12 on responsible consumption and production).
• Setting a baseline against which testing policy options and green transitions scenarios: the modularity of the indicators can formulate scenarios affecting not only lifestyles but all the stages along the supply-chain (from raw material extraction to end of life) as well as technological changes in the life cycle of products.
• Evaluating lifestyles and consumption patterns, which can be compared to EU and Member State average lifestyles.
• Identifying transboundary and spillovers effects, since the indicators could unveil the trade footprint, namely the amount of impacts embodied in imported goods.