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When household income reaches $10,000 or so (in purchasing power parity [PPP] rather than international exchange rates), people can afford to buy televisions, refrigerators, washing machines and many other perquisites of what they perceive as the affluent life. Many shift to a strongly meat-based diet. A good number can even buy cars; in 1997, more motor vehicles were sold in Asia than in Western Europe and North America combined.

These new consumers should enjoy the fruits of their affluence - but when combined with the far greater consumption in developed countries, there will be a markedly adverse impact on the environment. With potentially twice as many new consumers in the next ten years, the global community should be interested in the new consumers. This raises several fundamental questions:

• Can the new consumers be enabled to engage in enhanced consumption in a manner consistent with sustainable development (i.e. with less harm to the environment)?
• What can they learn from the mistakes and positive experiences of the long time affluent nations in order to keep their environmental impacts at acceptable levels?
• How far can the established, affluent consumers be persuaded to adopt more sustainable lifestyles (i.e. less environmentally harmful) which could serve as models for the new consumers?

While recognizing the need for efforts to change the habits of established, affluent consumers; and the need for continued efforts to address basic needs of the poor, this discussion focused primarily on new consumers. However, special emphasis was given to the notion that over-consumption can sometimes (and increasingly?) lead to under-consumption by the poor.

More Background about consumption patterns.

Short term:

• to define and delineate the issue in all salient aspects;
• to document the main loci of the new consumers, both present and prospective;
• to identify their main adverse impacts, especially environmental (pollution, waste, etc.);
• to propose ways to reduce and otherwise contain their impacts; and
• to present the research's findings, conclusions and recommendations in a book-length report.

References
Galbraith, J.K. 1996. The Good Society. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Massachusetts.

Redclift, M. 1996. Wasted: Counting the Cost of Global Consumption. Earthscan, London.

About Dr. Myers

He is a Fellow of Green College, Oxford University, and holds visiting professorships at the Universities of California, Texas, Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, Cape Town and Utrecht. He is a Foreign Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

He is the first British scientist to have won the Volvo Environment Prize and the UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize; and the second British scientist to receive a Pew Fellowship in Conservation and Environment. In 1998 he was awarded a Queen's Honour for "services to the global environment."

He has been a policy advisor to the White House, World Bank, World Wildlife Fund, the Smithsonian Institution, NASA, the U.S. State Department, the MacArthur and Rockefeller Foundations, several UN agencies and the European Commission.

Recent publications include "The Primary Source: Tropical Forests and Our Future" (Norton, New York, 1992); "Environmental Exodus: An Emergent Crisis in the Global Arena" (Climate Institute, Washington DC, 1995). His most recent book is "Perverse Subsidies: Tax $s Undercutting Our Economics and Environments Alike" (IISD, Winnipeg, 1998)

Acknowledgements