 The idea of sustainable consumption reduction really helps us operationalise and understand how we can achieve sustainable development in breaking it down into what we can do to improve the production efficiency of products but also what we can do to change our demand for products, our consumption of them and the importance of sustainable consumption reduction is understanding the whole supply chain so that products are produced for us to consume and we have a choice and we have a choice whether we buy products which are highly carbon intensive or ones which potentially have a lower impact on the environment or lower carbon output and so it gives us a model to be able to adjust and understand a whole range of options to achieve the deep and radical cuts which we need to achieve a stable climate in the future We analyse the supply chain through using a range of modelling techniques but is mainly or heavily reliant on economic modelling which understands how industry interacts and exchanges products within industry and then how these are delivered to the consumer so this involves us having a detailed understanding of virtually every single country's production structure the way that they interchange their products and materials and then also having a detailed understanding of where they export these products to and who imports them Clearly everything that we consume in Sweden or in the UK, let's say is not produced in the country where we live and so we need a detailed understanding of these trade flows and the associated impacts that they have The trends that we're seeing is that the industrialised countries are actually becoming less industrialised in that they are producing less products We find that we are producing or shifting towards a service-based economy and all the products which we consume are produced abroad and imported Now where this is extremely important is for example with climate change negotiations at the moment the country which produces the product is held responsible for those emissions albeit that they are consumed in a country with greater wealth and also greater opportunities to actually reduce emissions So we start to see China being held responsible for European consumption I think that policymakers need to take responsibility and be more transparent about the decisions that they are making We found that the response in the UK to research on the flows of carbon and what they were responsible for abroad actually led to a defensive response one which said well we're not responsible for these emissions but ultimately we need them to recognise the fact that we might actually have an impact on the rest of the world that at some point we may have to actually help in abatement and in new technologies to the new emerging nations and we may actually need to support them We've built our economies for the last 100 years when carbon was free we're now asking new emerging economies to build their economy on carbon at a price