Towards a new view of sustainable development: human well-being and environmental stress

Understanding the relationship between human well-being and the stress economic activity places on the environment is a central challenge of sustainability research. Lamb et al (2014 Environ. Res. Lett. 9 014011) provide two important results that will influence future analyses. First, they show that the drivers of consumption that induce anthropogenic carbon emissions are similar to but not the same as the drivers of place-based (i.e., production driven) carbon emissions. Second, they show that a diverse set of countries are able to achieve high levels of human well-being while placing relatively little stress on the environment. Since the desire of low emission countries to increase emissions in pursuit of development is a major blockage point in international climate negotiations, the finding that emissions are decoupled from increased well-being is not only of scientific interest, it could also inform policy discussions.