Developing sufficiency policies

Sufficiency is a policy approach that aims to avoid demand for energy, materials, land and water, and ensure wellbeing for all humans, while staying within planetary boundaries.

Sufficiency is a whole-of-government approach that aims to create the structural change needed for societies to consume less overall. It also seeks to ensure wellbeing for all people.  It requires reassessing our needs and the ways they can be met. It requires policies with firm targets and supporting infrastructure, to foster change in individuals and businesses. 

Examples of sufficiency policies are: workplaces closer to homes; public transport systems that everyone can access and afford; reducing cars on the road; sharing building spaces; providing enough housing, goods, clothing and food to meet our needs, but not exceed them.

Humanity’s rapacious consumption is more than Earth and its climate can handle, which is driving an ecological crisis. At the same time, people in some parts of the world lack the material goods to meet their basic needs, while many people in wealthier societies have more than enough to live comfortably.

Sufficiency is not the same as efficiency, which is about producing more of a good or service with less energy, time or materials – often achieved through technological innovation.  Unlike sufficiency, efficiency does not avoid or reduce overall demand to a point where humanity is operating within Earth’s limits. Nor does it explicitly focus on reducing inequality.

In 2022, a major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted the need for sufficiency measures in the built environment sector, to contain global warming to 1.5°C.  It said up to 61% of global building emissions could be mitigated by 2050 if a range of measures were implemented, including “[s]ufficiency policies that avoid the demand for energy and materials”.

France enshrined sufficiency in its energy law in 2015. French energy authorities say sufficiency measures, such as lower energy use in households and less travel, may enable emissions cuts of 10% by 2030.

In March 2024, 83 organisations in Europe released a manifesto urging the European Union to make sufficiency central to its agenda.