Better quality of life, less environmental consumption

The ecological challenges are becoming increasingly urgent: resources are finite, biodiversity is declining and greenhouse gases are fuelling global warming.

Political actors have so far relied primarily on strategies of efficiency (e.g. green technologies) and consistency (e.g. recycling management) to enable sustainable economic activity. The third link in the triangle – sufficiency – often remains in the background. Sufficiency not only poses the frequently asked question “What is enough? Sufficiency is also a substitution strategy aimed at replacing unsustainable patterns of consumption with sustainable ones. It focuses on the question of how needs can be satisfied in a different way or how they cannot be satisfied at all.

In the project “More Quality of Life, Less Environmental Consumption” we focus on anchoring the issue of sufficiency policy in the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU). With a co-creative process we support 7-10 selected specialist units of these two institutions in developing their own project ideas with regard to sufficiency policy. These are geared to the needs of the staff and challenges in the specialist units. On the one hand, we encourage existing supporters of sufficiency policy by identifying concrete options for action. On the other hand, we win undecided or uninformed actors for the topic. In the long term, the project thus leads to a strong environmental policy that integrates sufficiency as an important pillar and combines the three sustainability strategies in a successful and balanced way.