Reducing Society’s Environmental Footprint

While local environmental quality (e.g. ambient air pollution, water pollution) has improved dramatically in most advanced industrialized countries since the 1970s the total environmental impact of their economic activity globally shows few signs of improvement. This means that the population of wealthy countries is benefiting from a high quality of life, one part of which is high environmental quality, partly at the expense of other parts of the world population and its ecosystems.

Mitigating this mismatch poses complex policy challenges. Policy choices in this area must be informed by scientific knowledge on several issues.

• In which areas and economic sectors of a country do particular types of environmental impacts originate and where and how do they get allocated domestically and beyond a given country’s borders to specific locations around the world?
• How much are consumers and citizens in wealthy countries aware of and how much do they care about distributions of total environmental impacts of consumption within and beyond the borders of their country?
• How could potential policy-interventions be designed (e.g. in terms of combinations of voluntary private sector and government regulation) so as to be both politically feasible and environmentally effective?

In addressing these issues, the summer school will focus on measuring and assessing society’s environmental footprint, the psychology, economics, and politics of changing environmental footprints, and on firms, industries, and supply chains.