Polfree
Using fewer resources and serious action against climate change can lead to more jobs, positive economic development and a high quality of life. This is the main result of the European POLFREE project.
There is no single, ‘correct’ answer to how we may achieve a resource-efficient economy. Policies may be introduced in a variety of combinations, and their selection will depend significantly on issues such as the division of institutional competence (such as between the EU and Member States), public acceptability and societal context.
The POLFREE project developed three ‘idealised’ scenarios for how such factors may develop in tandem to achieve the characteristics for a resource- efficient economy as defined above. Each focuses on different governance strategies, with corresponding policy mixes that may be applied in such future worlds. Each scenario and policy mix was then modelled to determine the environmental and economic effects that may be expected as a result of each pathway, and how they compare to a business-as-usual future. The three scenarios are:
- ‘Global Cooperation’ – All countries around the world pursue a resource-efficient and low-carbon economy, with multilateral agreements and international coalitions leading to the widespread, often harmonised adoption of increasingly ambitious economic and regulatory policy instruments across all sectors of the global economy. ‘Green growth’ becomes the global macroeconomic objective.
- ‘EU Goes Ahead’ – The EU pursues the development of a resource-efficient, low-carbon economy through ‘green growth’, whilst the rest of the world continues along a business-as-usual pathway. The policies introduced are similar to those in ‘Global Cooperation’, but applied to the EU and EU Member States only, and with adjustments to compensate for potential industrial competitiveness issues.
- ‘Civil Society Leads’ – Individuals and businesses take the lead and initiate a ‘bottom-up’ transformation in the use of resources in the EU, through changing preferences in how much they work in the formal economy (preferring to spend more time with their family, local communities and in volunteer work), in what and how much they consume, and in how they consume it. A ‘Beyond GDP’ objective emerges, allowing for a diversification of measures of progress, different measures that are come to be seen to be more important than GDP growth. The rest of the world continues along a business-as-usual pathway.