Back to Electronic Conferences | Introduction

Key Questions to be addressed

1. What is a new consumer?
   With household income (two salaries?) of $10,000 per year, in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity)?

2. Where are these new consumers mainly located?
   There seem to be sizeable communities in those countries with large-ish populations and rapidly growing economies: China, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Turkey, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina; also East European countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, and countries of the former Soviet Union such as Russia and Ukraine. True, some of these countries have experienced recent downturns in their economies, but for purposes of this discussion it is not expected that these setbacks will persist for more than a few years.

3. How fast are the new consumers' numbers increasing?
   
   • What can we reasonably expect by the years 2010 and 2025, assuming recent trends can be extended (some may accelerate, others decline, according to a host of economic and political factors)?
   • Are additional nations likely to join the list, e.g. Philippines, Myanmar, Peru and South Africa?

4. Will their consumption patterns persist along the lines of today's?
   Could they intensify in certain respects while relaxing in others, through, for example, greater emphasis on housing rather than cars--or the other way round?  For instance, the Chinese government aims to renovate or build from scratch a total of 90 million houses, constructed mainly of wood. Were China to increase its consumption to match Indonesia's in 1990, its share would amount to almost 60% of Asia's 1990 total -- and if it ever matched Japan's it would be 280% of Asia's total (Ryan and Flavin, 1995). In short, China seems poised to become the world's leading importer of wood, with all that will mean for logging surges in Southeast Asia and Siberia, if not further afield.

5. What are the chief environmental impacts of today's new consumers?
   • Are they largely limited to such obvious items as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (notably from cars) and preference for eating higher on the food chain?
   • Of GHGs, should the project be concerned only with carbon dioxide (CO₂), or should it consider methane (CH₄), notably from increasing numbers of livestock (for meat-based diets) and from growing expanses of rice paddies (which will support the under-consumers as well as the new consumers)?
   • Is there still much of a threat from refrigerators manufactured with CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons)?
   • Will the increased water demands of new consumers contribute to water shortages in countries that are "thirsty" already? The water table is dropping by one to two metres per year in the North Plain of China, an area containing almost 40% of China's population and 50% of its cropland.
   • How far are there domino effects? For example, can a propensity for eating beef stimulate ranching in drier rangelands, thus fostering desertification? As people shift to more of a meat-based diet, will that drive up market prices for grain and thus aggravate problems of poverty and malnutrition among the "bottom billion", in turn accentuating the phenomenon of "marginal people in marginal environments"?

6. Can we expect that consumption/environment linkages will remain pretty much the same in the future?
   • Can we anticipate that some linkages will become more pervasive and harmful, while others are reduced?
   • What scope is there for e.g. "Factor Four" (or even "Factor Ten") reductions in energy use, greater recycling of materials, enhanced waste management, and general resource efficiency all round?
   • How far can the new consumers' perceptions of the good life be oriented away from the more deleterious aspects of "the American dream" with its tendencies toward wasteful consumption and other forms of mis-consumption? How great an impact will there be from the Internet? Today 1 in every 40 people on the planet has access to the internet, and although 90 percent of users are in industrial countries, numbers are increasing rapidly in developing countries (China has twice as many users as in 1997 and they are projected to multiply several-fold in the next few years).

7. What can be done on the policy front to relieve and reduce the environmental impact of the new consumers?
   • What fiscal instruments (tax incentives, subsidies, etc.) are available to alter consumer habits?
   • What "perverse" subsidies still persist, sending the entirely wrong messages to producers and consumers alike?
   • How far can publicity and educational campaigns serve to change consumer aspirations?
   • How far can technology pre-empt the problem?
   • What role can there be for the media in modifying citizen tastes, individual lifestyles, community values and social paradigms?
   • What scope is there for "leapfrog" technologies, enabling developing countries to bypass the most serious errors of industrialized countries? For instance, avoiding expensive copper-wire based telephone networks and moving straight to fibre optic cable or to cellphone telephone networks.

References
Ryan, M. and C. Flavin. 1995. "Facing China's Limits." In L.R. Brown et al., State of the World 1995: 113-131. Norton, New York.