Sustainable Production Consumption System (SPACES)

The SPACES project focuses on integrated management to support production and consumption systems in a way that the transformation of energy, materials and knowledge maintains or improves human well-being and capacity to adapt without reducing the long-term ability of ecosystems.

“A production-consumption system links environmental goods and services with households, firms and states through linkages in which energy and materials are transformed and other transactions, for example of money or information, take place. A production-consumption system is sustainable if the transformation of energy, materials and knowledge maintains or improves human well-being and capacity to adapt without reducing the long-term ability of ecosystems to provide a diverse set of goods and services.”

Based on this definition the project “SPACES” focuses on integrated management of production and consumption systems. There are two key reasons for framing the challenge as one of sustainability of “production-consumption” systems rather than the more conventional focus on production technologies and regulation. The first is the need to bring attention of the processes closer to the decisions and actions of final consumer when undertaking analyses of the underlying reasons for environmental impacts at remote, more primary, “production”, parts of commodity chains. The second is that a commodity chain itself can be thought of a series or network of many production-consumption relationships. For each linkage we can ask questions from both a production perspective (how could this industrial process be made more resource efficient?), and, in addition, a consumption perspective (What are the underlying drivers of downstream demands in the network or value chain?). Consumption and production perspectives are complimentary but not alternatives.

The project has adopted a two-part strategy. First it will prepare a state-of-the-art review of the knowledge with action issues associated with managing production-consumption systems in an integrated way. Second it will carry out small number of in-depth case studies building on interactions with practitioners and other stakeholders are already in place and through which they can be meaningfully engaged.

SPACES is part of the International Project on Sustainability Science and Technology: Linking Knowledge with Action (SustSci) which is developing partnerships and dialogues to link sectors and regions in science-based, action-oriented initiatives to promote sustainability.