Toward Sustainable Consumption

Abstract

The need for water, energy, and food resources is central to human being. Demand of these resources will increase as global population increases. By 2050 it is expected that combination of population growth and economic development will lead to 50% increase of global water and food demand, while energy demand will be doubled. Addressing sustainable water, energy, and food consumption has also been emphasized in United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals; among others, this applies to consumption at household level. Sustainable household consumption of water, energy, and food here implies not only the objective to improve the resource durability, but also to reduce environmental footprint. The unsustainable management of these resources will potentially harm the climate objective addressed in the Paris Agreement in which The Netherlands, among other countries, have been participating.

Acknowledging the importance of household consumption on the environment, a joint research team funded by the National Science Foundation named INFEWS (Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems) is commissioning this research project to investigate policy measures to sustainably reduce greenhouse gas emission concerning Dutch household food, energy, and water consumption sector. The main objective of this research is to obtain insight on the dynamics and interrelations of Dutch household water, energy, and food consumption; and to develop policy recommendations based on the insight toward reducing the direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) level associated with the household consumption over time in the Netherlands.

To achieve this objective, this research mainly utilizes data-driven exploratory modeling approach in which the interrelations of water, energy, and food consumption system are modeled and simulated over time, while acknowledging the plausible parametric and structural uncertainties natural to the state of modeled subsystems. System Dynamics methodology is used to conceptualize the causal relations among the relevant subsystems and to computationally develop the model in a form of stock-flow diagram. Based on the developed model, the Exploratory Modeling and Analysis methodology is used to explore the model within the associated uncertainties. Through these methods, two types of policy frameworks can be respectively tested and explored. The first one consists of the policy approaches within household consumption domain. The second one consists of the plausible policy options outside of the household consumption domain which are relevant to improve the GHG indicator.