POLFREE – Policy Options for a Resource Efficient Economy

The project will construct a theoretical framework for the analysis of resource efficiency, with detailed comparison of the trends and policies at EU and Member State (MS) level, cross-country econometric analysis to derive resource-reduction cost curves, and an analysis of business barriers to resource efficiency; thereby developing an enhanced understanding of the drivers of inefficient resource use.

This will lead to an exploration of new concepts and paradigms that can bring about a radical increase in resource efficiency, and a vision for a resource-efficient economy in the EU, with suggestions also for new more resource-efficient business models for firms, and ideas for a global governance regime that can promote resource-efficient economies among the EU’s trading partners and more widely will be explored. From its new vision for a resource-efficient Europe, the project will propose new policy mixes, business models and mechanisms of global governance through which resource-efficient economies may be promoted.

This will lead in turn to intensive work on creating,modelling and visualising scenarios for the emergence of resource-efficient economies, through linking quantitative economic and ecological models, and simulating the policies and policy mixes derived in the earlier work, supplemented with appropriate LCA analysis for selected products and sectors, to ensure that the policies and business models in the scenarios lead to adequate absolute decoupling of economic activity from resource use and environmental degradation. The scenarios and associated policy analysis will be given an integrated interpretation across economic, ecological and social dimensions.