Tackling overconsumption - an animated resource

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Friends of the Earth Europe, the European Environmental Bureau and European Youth Forum have created a new animated webpage on EU overconsumption. It illustrates that the climate crisis is the symptom, overconsumption is the disease!

  • The disease: The EU's growth-based economy is driving a depletion of Earth’s finite resources. This is fueling a double burnout of people and planet. Europe’s material footprint is double a sustainable level.
  • The wrong medicine: Yet EU decision-makers are trying to fix the problems caused by overconsumption with more materials and resources. 
  • The root cause: Overconsumption is essentially fueled by a systemic obsession with growth. Our current economic system feeds on endless profit, extraction, production and consumption, all resulting in more excretion, environmental destruction and inequality.
  • The treatment: The climate crisis, and other ecological and social crises, can only be addressed by tackling overconsumption and transitioning to a new economic model that is not dependent on continuous economic growth. The European Commission must drive action on systemic solutions by including in their 2023 Work Programme commitments to assess the amount of resources the EU can sustainably and fairly consume within planetary boundaries and to establish a binding reduction target for EU material footprint, and detailed plans to reach it. This is something the European Parliament has already called for in three reports in 2021 alone!

Categorised in:
Climate Change
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education