Developing Resource Use Scenarios for Europe. WWWforEurope Working Paper No. 25

We suggest four scenarios for European resource use up to the year 2050, aligning with the global resource use scenarios developed by UNEP's International Resource Panel (2011). A "trend scenario" prolonging Europe's resource use into the future proves to be very close to the "freezing" scenario proposed by UNEP for high income industrial countries, and leads to an average per-capita resource use in Europe on the same level as in the early 2000's. A "best practice scenario" generalises the past success of some European countries in downsizing their resource use to all European countries up to 2050. The fourth scenario, the "radical transformation scenario", follows UNEP's "moderate contraction and convergence scenario" in halving the per-capita annual resource use of European countries, leading to what is commonly called "absolute decoupling". As a conclusion we show that a successful scenario exercise requires an intimate collaboration between macroeconomic modellers and scientists contributing from the environmental and socio-ecological angle. There will be place for such collaboration in the further course of the WWWforEurope project.