Resources and consumption campaign:

Europe is using an ever-increasing amount of the world's resources, and is now more dependent on imported resources than any other global region (see our ‘Overconsumption?’ report to learn more).

The Earth’s ability to sustain this pattern of consumption is already being pushed to the limit. But Europe’s dependence on imported resources also makes it economically vulnerable, with the extraction and processes of these resources having both social and environmental impacts.

Friends of the Earth Europe is calling on the EU to take the first steps to tackle this issue by ensuring that our resource use is measured, and by adopting new policies to increase our resource efficiency, such as higher recycling targets. We set out the case for this in our new briefing “Measuring Our Resource Use”.

The EU should also start to devise long term targets and strategies in order to radically reduce our resource use.

photocredit: Courtesy of the Port of Felixstowe

Why is resource use important?

Natural resources are the foundation of our economy. Without the constant use of natural resources neither our economy nor our society could function. Nature provides humans with all the resources necessary for life, including:

• energy for heat, electricity and mobility;
• metals for high tech equipment
• wood for furniture and paper products ;
• construction materials for our roads and houses; 
• food and water for a healthy diet.

 As global standards of living increase, and the global population continues to rise, we are making ever-higher demands on the planet. This is creating competition between different regions of the world, with high resource prices impacting on the poor, and competition between different uses of resources, for example whether land is used for food, fuels or biodiversity.

Resource Use: a key sustainability issue

Our consumption of natural resources includes not just the physical materials that are extracted but also the global ecosystems, services and cycles that regulate conditions on the planet. Climate change is the first big environmental limit that humanity is facing (see Big Ask Europe web page), however this is not the only ecological crisis being driven by our consumption of the Earth’s resources. Others include:

• The oceans are being emptied of fish far faster than they can replenish themselves;
• forests are being cleared for animal feed and fuel crops such as soya and oil palm;
• ecosystems and habitats are increasingly imperilled by pollution from industrial, extractive and dumping activity.

EU environmental policy - past, present and future

Over the past 30 years Europe has made significant progress in tackling environmental problems related to specific pollutants and harmful substances, such as air pollutants, sewage effluents and hazardous waste. But environmental problems related to the overall scale of European production and consumption are getting worse.

It is true that the EU has made significant progress in improving its resource efficiency, in other words the amount of a product it can make for one euro, pound or dollar. However this has not resulted in reduced consumption of natural resources by the EU because these increases in efficiency have been outweighed by increases in consumption.

The current raft of EU environmental policies fail to adequately address the fundamental problem of rising resource use in a resource-finite world:

• Despite years of discussion, the EU still doesn’t measure its resource use, new polices are not assessed for their impact on resource use, and the EU has no targets to reduce our resource use.
• Through its ‘Raw Materials Initiative’, the EU has shown more interest in securing access to resources from developing countries than in increasing Europe’s resource efficiency. This focus jeopardises poverty alleviation and development in these countries – see the FOE Europe response to this strategy for more details.
• Even in policy areas where the EU can easily achieve resource efficiency gains – such as waste policy – the EU is failing to bring in effective policy measures to make sure this happens. For example, a recent analysis for Friends of the Earth showed that Europe is currently burying and burning more than €5 billion of valuable resources (see our “Gone to Waste” report for more details).

With the EU so dependent on imported resources there is clearly an urgent need for more policies to boost eco-efficiency and reduce waste.

How can we measure Europe’s resource use?

The EU does not currently measure its overall use of resources, which makes it difficult for targets to be set or policies to be evaluated.

Friends of the Earth Europe, together with Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI) in Vienna have been working to establish a set of effective but achievable indicators of resource use.

Following discussions with various experts, SERI have formulated a set of indicators, each of which includes the ‘rucksack’ of materials, land, water or greenhouse gas emissions that were used in making (or growing) a product:

• Material use (which can also be divided into biotic and abiotic materials), including the rucksack of materials used in making imported products.
• Total land use of countries (including via imported products), or the land use to make a product.
• Water use of a country (including via imported products), or the water footprint of a product.
• Greenhouse gas emissions (including emissions from imported products), or the carbon footprint of products.

For more details, see our report on “Measuring Europe’s Resource Use”.

All these indicators already exist, and they are all quite transparent, measuring clear physical quantities.
The indicators do not directly measure biodiversity impacts, though they can be used to highlight issues to be investigated – i.e. if a new policy (e.g. biofuel targets) results in a big increase in EU land use, then there should be further investigation.
They also don’t address chemical or pollution issues, but indicators have not proved to be effective in this area, and specific regulation (e.g. the REACH chemicals policy) is more effective

How would the measures be used?

• The indicators can be used by the EU & governments to set targets, measure progress and establish policies (including in impact assessment of policy changes).
• They can be used by companies to assess and improve the resource use associated with their products and activities.

Next steps:

Friends of the Earth Europe wants to see these resource use indicators adopted into the EU policy making process. By doing so Europe will be taking the first steps to becoming not just a decarbonised but also a highly resource efficient economy, with the social, environmental and economic benefits that would bring.

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