Professor Michael Zwicky Hauschild, the head of the centre, answers the questions.
What is absolute sustainability?
That is when we use nature’s tolerance limits as a measure of how much we can allow our products and actions to impact the climate and the environment. The tolerance limits define a scope for manoeuvre, and we only have the planet’s total scope for manoeuvre for our activities. Within this scope, we must all have food, clean water, shelter, transportation, etc.
By assigning our various activities their share of the scope, we get an idea of what it takes not to exceed it, how efficient we must be at carrying out the activity, and how good it must be before it’s good enough.
Why isn’t it okay to ‘just’ be sustainable?
The past many years have taught us that it has not been enough to slightly optimize everything to make it a little more sustainable. For example, we have improved the petrol and diesel cars so they run longer on a litre of fuel. But when the absolute sustainability goal here is that we must be climate neutral, i.e. not emit CO2, then the internal combustion engine will never be a sustainable solution as long as it runs on fossil fuels.
So we have actually made efforts to improve a technology that does not have the potential to ever be sustainable in an absolute sense. Instead of making the wrong technology less wrong, we need to identify technologies, such as electric or hydrogen cars that have the potential to become sustainable in an absolute sense, and work to develop those.
Is there a risk that perfect will become the enemy of the good?
Yes, and there is a risk of impotence if we choose to do nothing. But it’s important to remember that with absolute sustainability, we are playing the long game, i.e. 20-30 years. It’s not about becoming absolutely sustainable tomorrow, but about becoming absolutely sustainable by, say, 2050.
The government’s goal of becoming fully carbon neutral by 2050 is an example of an absolute goal that serves as a benchmark for sustainable development in the long run. And with nearly 30 years ahead of us, we should have enough time to develop the technologies that can support the goal.
Do we have time to wait 30 years?
With an absolute target in 2050, we get a line of sight and thus also the sub-goal of a 70 per cent reduction by 2030, and that helps to get us started, so we don’t just sit around waiting for things to happen. Moreover, technology development takes a long time. It is one thing that we can make all sorts of solutions in the laboratories at DTU, but it requires technology maturation, scaling up, and an actual market before we can roll out technologies such as Power-to-X or CO2 capture on a commercial scale.
But isn’t it better to optimize a bit in the meantime?
Unfortunately, we often see that when we streamline a technology, whether it is cars that achieve a better fuel consumption or LED lights that consume less power than the incandescent bulb, we just start consuming more. We travel longer distances in our cars or use them more often or put up more lighting when its becomes cheaper. Or we use the money saved for something else, such as travels or eating out. It is a well-known mechanism called the rebound effect. Technology efficiency often just leads to more consumption.
Is there any sustainable product out there?
It’s difficult to define a product as sustainable in itself from the absolute perspective. All products cause some kind of impact on either our climate or the environment. Therefore, it makes more sense to talk about whether we have a sustainable lifestyle from an absolute perspective.
If we imagine that each individual on Earth has a scope for manoeuvre that defines how much that individual can afford to consume the planet's resources on food, shelter, transport, entertainment, etc., then we can also calculate how much we can consume without it putting a critical strain on the climate and the environment. In this perspective, you may well have room in your scope for manoeuvre to eat red meat if, for example, you do not travel by plane. Or you can go by plane, but then there you may not be able to ‘afford’ to eat red meat.
How might the new centre play a role?
With the centre, we will focus on the scientific work of finding out how we can help the Danish and international community achieve absolute sustainability. We will do so by developing, among other things, the necessary measurement methods, but also by developing technology. A very important task for the centre will be to reach out to the surrounding society, for example through collaboration with businesses to map their path to absolute sustainability, among other things.
