Consumer Awareness

By University of Borås

Published on 24 March 2025

Sweden

About this good practice

Science Park Borås at the University Borås releases an annual report on sustainable consumption. In the 2024 edition we looked into 12 scenarios for sustainable futures and surveyed over 1000 Swedish citizens to understand attitudes towards each scenario. The result shows “actionable” scenarios that decision makers can address to increase the likelihood for a bigger sustainable impact.

All though industries as well as the public sector all across Europe are working to ramp up circular initiatives, the demand for circular and sustainable solutions is lagging behind, both from a b2b and b2c perspective. By working with scenarios, we are able to look beyond individual legislations or product segments and visualize the kind of society we could be experiencing and understand underlying motivations for the transformation.

In Science Park Borås 2024 report on sustainable consumption we gained understanding about what characteristics of a sustainable future is considered desirable and realistic, as well as the opposite: what future scenarios do we not want to realize?
These insights are not only beneficial for companies wanting to explore approaches to sustainability that creates engagement among consumers but also key insights for impactful policy making addressing sustainable transition.

Expert opinion

The unique report “12 scenarios shaping a sustainable future” presents twelve future scenarios that together provide a picture of a possible sustainable future. The respondents chose which scenarios they see as more or less likely, and which are more or less desirable. One of the more surprising insights is that 45% of respondents wish for a major climate disaster to occur to accelerate climate action, while 22% believe this will actually happen. The findings indicate a sense of urgency and perhaps frustration among citizens, feeling that only drastic events could spur the necessary changes to address climate challenges effectively. This underscores the need for proactive and robust climate policies to align public sentiment with actionable outcomes. These findings can be useful to the national government, as well as environmental organisations. It would be interesting to do a similar survey across the European Union and compare the results from the individual countries.

Magda Michaliková

Works at Interreg Europe Policy Learning Platform

Resources needed

Seven persons from Science Park Borås team were involved in the making of the project, each contributing 20 hours work.
The survey and main writing was done by analyst firm Karios Future.

Evidence of success

We have presented the report in several forums, such as Almedalen, Borås Textile Days and for several closed group of different stakeholders. Based on the presentations we se a big interest for the findings and the perspectives that we provide in this as well as the previous reports. 9 months after the release we still get approximately one download per day of the report, which indicates a continuous interest.

Potential for learning or transfer

Firstly we think that the perspective of consumption and the demand-side of sustainable transition is still quite rare, so with these reports we provide something unique for others to be inspired from. The 2025 report will replicate the 2024 but focusing on different geography in Europe, providing insights for different European markets.