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The European Union’s 8th Environment Action Programme aims to significantly reduce its consumption footprint by 2030, and keep related environmental impacts within planetary boundaries. These impacts stem from consumption patterns and, depending on production locations, not confined to EU borders. During 2010-2022, the EU consumption footprint increased by around 8% and projections indicate a further increase by 2030, caused by economic growth and consumption patterns. The EU is not presently on track to reduce its consumption footprint sufficiently. Switching to less harmful products and curbing consumption levels are strongly recommended to reach the target.
Figure 1. EU consumption footprint, in a single indexed score (2010=100), broken down into the most significant contributing impact categories of the Environmental Footprint (EF) method, from 2010 to 2022
The Eighth Environment Action Programme (8th EAP) calls for a rapid, significant reduction in the EU’s consumption footprint to align with planetary boundaries. To achieve this, the EU must accelerate its transition to adopting a regenerative growth model, to give back to the planet more than it takes, as outlined in the Circular economy action plan.
The Consumption footprint estimates the environmental and climate impacts occurring as a result of EU citizens’ consumption of products and their use. The EU consumption footprint indicator methodolgy is based on life cycle assessment (LCA). It uses the European Commission’s environmental footprint method to assess environmental impacts in 16 different categories, such as climate change, resource depletion, and particulate matter. LCA data for a set of representative products are used to calculate environmental impacts per product, irrespective of production location, and scaled up to represent impacts from entire EU consumption, based on consumption statistics. The indicator can be aggregated to give a single score, based on a normalisation and weighting system (represented in Figure 1).
The EU’s consumption footprint per capita for the average EU citizen increased, by around 8% in the period 2010-2022 (Figure 1). Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita increased by almost 19% over the same period. This indicates that the impacts of the EU’s consumption are growing at a slower pace than its economy, suggesting a relative decoupling of the consumption footprint from economic growth.
However, on a per capita basis, the consumption footprint and GDP still appear to be somewhat correlated (e.g. both declined in 2020 during the economic slowdown from pandemic-related measures). This means that reducing the impacts of EU consumption in absolute terms in a growing economy will be challenging.
In 2022, food consumption contributed the most (49%) to the total environmental impact in the EU, followed by housing (17%) and mobility (16%). The largest contributions to the consumption footprint are those related to climate change (23%), the use of fossil resources (13%) and particulate matter release (11%).
The environmental impact of EU citizens’ consumption is considered high overall. Evidence increasingly suggests that, based on current consumption footprint levels, the EU exceeded its fair share of planetary boundaries for five environmental impact categories in 2022, including particulate matter, climate change and freshwater ecotoxicity.
Based on current patterns and expected economic growth, the EU’s consumption footprint is projected to increase again by 2030. Recent trends show the consumption footprint increased by 6.3% between 2020 and 2022. Therefore, the EU is not on track to meet its aim of significantly reducing this footprint by 2030.
The EU may reduce its consumption footprint by:
It is worth noting that service consumption has less of an impact on the environment than the consumption of goods. Adopting circular business models based on sharing or product-as-a-service schemes for example, would be beneficial.
Figure 2. Level of consumption footprint (points per capita) for EU countries in 2022 compared to 2010
In 2022, Luxembourg had the highest consumption footprint among the 27 EU Member States, while Romania had the lowest, at just over half of Luxembourg's. Twelve countries had a footprint lower than the EU average. Between 2010 and 2022, 23 Member States showed increases in their consumption footprints, while only four showed decreases.
Ireland showed the highest decrease of 20%, followed by Sweden with 10%. However, most countries increased their footprint with Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland, Romania and Portugal registering increases higher than 20%. Interpreting these changes in national footprints is challenging. They depend on individual national economic structures and consumption patterns, as well as economic downturns over the 2010-2022 for some Member States. The changes may not be obvious to any concrete measures pursued by the countries to improve, optimise or decrease environmentally-related consumption patterns.