Globalized Consumption Undermines Efficiency-driven Sustainability Gains across Planetary Boundaries

Abstract

Despite decades of ambitious environmental policy, German consumption has continuously exceeded planetary-boundary thresholds in six of seven environmental dimensions since 1995, with little improvement over time. Combining environmentally extended multiregional input–output tables with life-cycle impact assessment, we develop a consumptionbased sustainability indicator across seven impact categories, benchmarked against national planetary-boundary thresholds. Decomposing impacts into scale and impact intensity per euro of production, we find that imports embody more impact per euro than domestic production in every category. A rising import share thus slows aggregate efficiency gains even as intensities fall in both origins, and the growing scale of imports offsets them altogether. We show that had the import share remained at its 1995 level, cumulative impact growth from 1995 to 2022 would have been 12.9 to 96.8 percentage points lower across categories.