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The paper summarises the findings and the work carried out within the Voluntary Agreements - Implementation and Efficiency project and examines five agreement schemes in the field of industrial energy efficiency in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, France and Sweden. It provides a brief characterisation of the different approaches and discusses the related implementation effort and transaction costs. An assessment of performance and environmental effectiveness is given, followed by a discussion of the transferability of voluntary agreements among countries and to the European level.
Unsustainable consumption patterns of the North (or rather of the global affluent consumers class) have been identified by Agenda 21 as one of the key driving forces behind the unsustainable development. However, neither accounting based on the system of national accounts SNA nor household economics provide the proper instruments to assess the environmental impact of household decision making. Eco-efficiency assessments as familiar in the business sector provide no appropriate tool for households. As an alternative an environmental space based assessment scheme is suggested covering the major pressures on the environment caused by household decisions. The methodology is used twice: once to analyse the environmental relevance of the main activity clusters of household consumption and once to identify the dominant acts of consumption within each cluster. The latter provide the basis for deriving environmental performance indicators. A rough analysis of household influence potentials permits to identify housing, eating and mobility as the three priority fields for action for minimising the environmental impact of households. Extending the influence analysis actor matrixes are derived allocating influence and thus responsibility for environmental pressures to different groups of economic agents.
Nach dem überwiegend vollzogenen Schritt von der genossenschaftlichen zur marktwirtschaftlichen Mobilitätsdienstleistung scheint das kommerzielle Car-Sharing in Deutschland am Beginn eines Systemwandels zu stehen. Dieser Wandel ist wahrscheinlich die Voraussetzung für den angestrebten breiten Markterfolg. Eine unerwünschte Nebenfolge könnte allerdings sein, dass die positiven ökologischen Effekte, mit denen auch das kommerzielle Car-Sharing bis heute verbunden wird, in der Zukunft deutlich zurückgehen oder sich sogar ins Gegenteil verkehren. Ob sich ein positiver oder negativer ökologischer Saldo einstellt, hängt entscheidend davon ab, wie sich die Angebotsstrategien der Car-Sharing Unternehmen einerseits und die Nutzerpräferenzen andererseits entwickeln.