Preface

This book seeks to create a shared language. It aims to spearhead a conversation about the future of consumer society in a world threatened by interlinked ecological and social tensions. Its premise is that we need to transition away from mass consumption as the organizing principle of societal life to a society in which the well-being and dignity of people are achieved with a much smaller impact on life-supporting earth systems. This book is especially aimed at researchers, teachers, policymakers, activists, businesspeople, professional communicators, and, crucially, members of the general public who recognize that the current trajectory for addressing the ecological crises is inadequate. This trajectory is largely based on technological solutions and economic quick-fixes to what is essentially a social problem. 

Since the United Nations (UN) Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, consumption has been recognized as an essential dimension of sustainable development. However, the concepts of sus-tainable consumption and lifestyles have remained poorly understood and articulated and, thus, underdeveloped for policy or consistent practical interventions. Since 1992, the few scholars work-ing on sustainable consumption did so in isolation from each other and often from others, even within their own disciplinary silos. They tended to be inexperienced in policy processes and had weak links with grassroots advocacy and activism. 

In 2008, a group of scholars in the United States created a forum for interconnecting these researchers and bridging their work with practitioners. It became the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI) – following a European Union-funded (EU) project a few years earlier under the name SCORE! The premise was that addressing the ecological problem by increasing energy efficiency and replacing fossil- with non-fossil energy sources addressed the supply side but ignored the demand side of the energy balance sheet and that this approach was woefully inadequate for reducing impacts associated with energy use. A better understanding was needed of why affluent societies consume so much and how that system of consumption functions. Today, with approximately 1,500 members and activities across all continents and many coun-tries, SCORAI is one of several nodes of research, policy analysis, and practice in the field of sustainable consumption and lifestyles. The Hot or Cool Institute, SCORAI’s partner in creating this book, is prominent among them. The work of Hot or Cool Institute is predicated on the under-standing that the magnitude, urgency, and scale of the ecological challenge require a rethink of our systems and how we organize ourselves as a society to meet our needs. 

The interdisciplinary understanding of how this complex system that we call consumer society functions and reproduces itself has made huge progress. Various branches of the United Nations and European governments, including the EU, have adopted official proclamations about the need to reduce consumption. Among the most recent examples, in 2024 the UN Environment Assembly adopted a dedicated resolution on “promoting sustainable lifestyles”. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which since its inception in 1988 has primarily focused on assessments of impacts and interventions, devoted an entire chapter of its Sixth Assessment Report in 2022 to consumption. It concluded that there is the untapped potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40–70% by 2050 through changes in consumption and lifestyles. Consumption also appears in the media with growing frequency. 

But policies and actions greatly lag behind this growing awareness, knowledge, and under-standing. To some extent, this is not surprising, as social change is often slow. Internal tensions also interfere with progress: between the interests and capabilities of the Global North and Global South; between science and politics; between the familiarity of established culture and the uncer-tainty of rapid change; between the huge cost of immediate action and the even greater future costs of inaction; between the need for a steady-state economy and concern for the well-being of people; between individual behavioral change and system change; between eroded social trust and cohesion in highly unequal societies and the need for collective action. In addition, sustainable consumption, unlike other urgent environmental problems and potential solutions, does not have a clear political champion. 

This book has two objectives. One is to curate a common language – a shared vocabulary of concepts – that will enable people from very diverse walks of life to understand and talk about the roots of the current ecological crisis and potential solutions. By assembling and cross-connecting the elements of that language in one place, we seek to create a conversation about consumption and lifestyles. In the digital age, anyone can find some kind of explanation online for each of the concepts included in this book. But we seek to impart a specific meaning to these concepts, to interpret them, their history, different perspectives, and applications in the context of consumption and social change. This vocabulary will hopefully result in a more robust and productive discourse and new insights on how to transition to a post-consumer society. 

The second objective is to strengthen the multidisciplinary community or network of research-ers, practitioners, and activists, and to create a common understanding of what we mean by “sustainable consumption and lifestyles”. As we will see from the various contributions, the under-standings, framings, focal points, problem definitions, and even language are quite different from each other, although there are obvious overlaps and similarities that we have tried to highlight. A common language is vital for shared and cohesive social change. We hope that ultimately this book will open new doors for action and mobilize the change makers, be they academics, activists, citizens, or policymakers. 

We thank the following colleagues for reviewing and commenting on an earlier version of the introduction which follows: Prof. Julia Steinberger, University of Lausanne; Dr. Elias T. Ayuk, International Resource Panel; Dr Yasuhiko Hotta, Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, Dr. Kathleen Rest, Union of Concerned Scientists; and Cory Alperstein, climate activist and inde-pendent scholar. We also want to thank all authors for patiently bearing with the editorial team and their many demands.