Linking local consumption to global impacts

Globalization increases the interconnectedness of people and places around the world through markets, flows of capital, labor, services, information, and human migration. In such a tightly connected world, goods and services consumed in one country are often produced in other countries and exchanged by international trade. Teleconnection is a concept from atmospheric sciences referring to climate phenomena being related to one another at large distances. Recently, this idea has been used to represent the virtual shrinking of distances between places, the strengthening of connectivity between distant locations, and, at the same time, the growing separation between places of consumption and production (Hubacek et al. 2014). Thus, consumption is increasingly met by global supply chains that often involve large geographical distances. As such, local consumption can have negative impacts on both the local and global environment, contributing to climate change, pollution, water scarcity, deforestation, and other land conversions, all of which impact important ecosystem services. Local decisions, through these global supply chains, potentially contribute and reinforce global inequalities and exploitation. People in high-income countries maintain more resource-intensive lifestyles, whereas people in low-income countries often bear the environmental and social consequences. More aware social and environmental decision making as well as adaptation and mitigation to climate change require a better understanding of such economic and environmental linkages. We need sophisticated tools to assess the range of environmental and social implications of our choices across spatial and temporal scales. Although research in this area has already begun, there are a number of areas where new research and theoretical guidance is needed—primarily through innovative linking of the local to the global. The goal of this special issue, “Linking Local Consumption to Global Impacts,” is to bring together different approaches and data sets to account for and analyze drivers of globalization, inequalities in consumption, income and wealth, and their social and environmental impacts across temporal and spatial scales by explicitly linking the local to the global. Twenty-one articles are included in this special issue. They provide an interesting overview of industrial ecology research dealing conceptually and empirically with coupling consumption and/or production and their environmental, economic, and social impacts over various scales. We find a wide range of approaches, combinations of methods and data sets. There are also a number of interesting applications and reflections on transdisciplinary science approaches to include stakeholders and other users of our research. The articles link consumption and/or production activities to a wide range of environmental impacts, such as water, energy and land use, various pollutants, and economic and social indicators, such as child labor, social costs of carbon, and loss of human life. We organized the discussion of the articles into three major, although partly overlapping, categories in this editorial: environmental impacts of economic sectors; environmental impacts of (household) consumption; and social impacts of consumption and production. The articles within each category are listed in alphabetical order.