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Meeting basic human needs for all people worldwide without exceeding the Planetary Boundaries is the key challenge for sustainable development. Main drivers that must be addressed are consumption, affluence, and inequality (Rockström et al., 2023) and the ethical principle ‘sufficiency’ is suggested to be imperative. Planetary Boundary-based Life Cycle Assessment is well-suited for this endeavor. However, it currently lacks sharing principles grounded in sufficiency. In this thesis I develop a new sufficiency-based sharing principle at a ‘per capita’ level for Denmark which is applicable to Planetary Boundary-based Life Cycle Assessment. As a first step, I conceptualize a Sufficiency Consumption Space for Denmark by a ‘human needs floor’ and an ‘ecological ceiling’, reflecting Decent Living Standards and the Planetary Boundaries. Based on this framework, I derive a new sufficiency-based sharing principle comprising of two sub parts: 1) The individual share of global Safe Operating Space is that is strictly reserved to satisfying Decent Living Standards per capita in Denmark. 2) The remaining individual Safe Operating Space that is left after satisfying the Decent Living Standards and remaining within the ecological ceiling of the Planetary Boundaries. Notably, this remaining individual Safe Operating Space can be used freely by individuals for any consumption purpose. Next, I conduct a bottom-up Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to investigate the environmental impacts of 625 household consumption goods in Denmark. This analysis illuminates the relation between different consumption goods’ and my newly developed sufficiency sharing principle. Finally, I suggest what consumption goods should be addressed from a sufficiency perspective by combining the LCA results with expenditure elasticities of Danish household consumption. This approach highlights the luxury goods with the highest environmental impact that can most easily be curtailed from a needs-based perspect

Forest plantation projects have become a prominent means of tackling climate change in recent years, simultaneously seeking to meet social and economic objectives. However, such projects can impact local communities, their values, and their meanings to nature. Moreover, plantation projects often reflect a green-on-green debate with opposing environmental arguments on each side of the debate. This study explores the context of Scotland, where a significant increase in woodland creation, as it is referred to in the Scottish context, has taken place in recent years. More specifically, this study investigates community members’ plural values and meanings on Waterside Hill in South Scotland and a related woodland creation project. Community meanings and values are complemented by the views of two other actors involved in the woodland creation project. The values and meanings are explored through concepts of instrumental, intrinsic, and relational values constituting the plural values. The place-based meanings of relational values are specifically captured through the sense of place (SOP) concept. The findings illustrate the presence of plural values in the woodland creation project, reflecting the overlaps, intersections, and conflicts between them. In particular, the findings highlight the significance of relational values, and hence place-based meanings, as well as the lack of their adequate recognition, understanding, and integration in the woodland creation project. The study further discussed the necessity of plural values through the integration of relational values in woodland creation projects, as well as the intrinsic complexity of achieving this.

Carbon dioxide removal is rapidly becoming a key focus in climate research and politics. This is raising concerns of “moral hazard” or “mitigation deterrence,” that is, the risk that promises of and/or efforts to pursue carbon removal end up reducing or delaying near-term mitigation efforts. Some, however, contest this risk, arguing that it is overstated or lacking evidence. In this review, we explore the reasons behind the disagreement in the literature. We unpack the different ways in which moral hazard/mitigation deterrence (MH/MD) is conceptualized and examine how these conceptualizations inform assessments of MH/MD risks. We find that MH/MD is a commonly recognized feature of modeled mitigation pathways but that conclusions as to the real-world existence of MH/MD diverge on individualistic versus structural approaches to examining it. Individualistic approaches favor narrow conceptualizations of MH/MD, which tend to exclude the wider political-economic contexts in which carbon removal emerges. This exclusion limits the value and relevance of such approaches. We argue for a broader understanding of what counts as evidence of delaying practices and propose a research agenda that complements theoretical accounts of MH/MD with empirical studies of the political-economic structures that may drive mitigation deterrence dynamics. This article is categorized under: The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Benefits of Mitigation The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance.