Environmental impacts of the domestic production and consumption of EU and EU countries

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

• Monitoring: yearly updates of the indicator allow tracking the evolution of impacts associated with changes in production and consumption patterns within Member States boundaries. This may be strategic for monitoring e.g.,:
  • how much the EU is decoupling environmental impacts from economic growth,
  • the benefits of transition towards circular economy,
  • the ability of the EU to remain within planetary boundaries
  • as well as progress related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (especially SDG12 on responsible consumption and production) (UN, 2015).

• Identification of environmental hotspots: identification of most contributing pressures (emissions or resources) to the environmental impacts e.g. towards reaching environmental targets. This can be performed at multiple levels:
  • elementary flows (resource use, emissions to the environment) to a specific environmental impact,
  • identifying the environmental impacts beyond the planetary boundaries requiring more urgent action.
• Setting a baseline for monitoring and against which testing policy options and scenarios: the Domestic Footprint sets a baseline for monitoring purposes of domestic impacts or for assessing scenarios based on, e.g., modelling exercises, such as expected effect of circular economy on resources use and climate change emissions.