Researchers, policymakers, and activists are becoming increasingly interested in sufficiency — the idea that we should prioritise basic needs for all over extravagances that few can afford. An economy focused on sufficiency would replace the production of luxuries with the production of essential goods for people that lack them today.
A crucial question for those studying such an economy is how this shift in production would impact the requirements for labour and natural resources (such as materials, energy, and emissions). Would meeting basic needs for all, while reducing luxury consumption, increase or decrease the need for labour and resources? Is such a shift even possible within environmental limits?
These questions are the focus of our recent research, which was recently published in Global Environmental Change. In this research, we used multi-regional input–output analysis to measure the labour and resource use requirements of two low-consumption scenarios, both designed to model an economy that aims to achieve basic needs:
- A decent living scenario, based on decent living standards put forward by Narasimha Rao and Jihoon Min as a set of universal conditions for human wellbeing, and
- A good life scenario, based on minimum income standards put forward by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, drawing on focus groups in the UK.
This approach has allowed us to generate quantitative minimum requirements for providing basic needs for all people, using the UK as a case study.
On the surface, we find that the decent living scenario provides some promising results: workers would have to work only 18 hours per week, which is 54% lower than the global average of 38 hours. Moreover, relative to the global average, emissions would be down 41%, energy use down 38%, and material use down 52%. Although many of these requirements are still above sustainable limits, they nevertheless represent clear improvements compared to the UK baseline and global average.
However, the reductions in the decent living scenario are partly the result of forgoing what many would perceive as essentials, not luxuries. The decent living scenario involves every household living in a small apartment, with basic groceries, clothes, and appliances provided. Yet, individuals do not have access to beds, furniture, eating utensils, alcohol, computers, or other leisure goods. At a community level, there is no funding for high schools or universities, public safety, government legislation, or maintenance of built capital. Healthcare spending is reduced by over 80% from the UK baseline.
Given the limitations of the decent living scenario, we therefore developed the good life scenario as an alternative. The good life scenario provides households with larger apartments, beds and other furniture, moderate alcohol consumption, and laptops. Community funding for education, healthcare, government, and the maintenance of built capital are significantly increased. This scenario is based on what UK residents say they need for a good life, drawing on focus group data.
While it arguably represents a more realistic level of consumption, the good life scenario would require substantial labour and resources. Workers would have to work, on average, 46 hours per week. While environmental impacts would decline compared to the UK baseline, emissions would be 10% higher, energy use 28% higher, and material use 15% higher than the global average. Given that we are currently transgressing six of nine planetary boundaries, these increases would clearly not be sustainable.
Provisioning systems must change to provide a good life for all
It is important to stress that our results are based on the current supply chains of the UK, and the UK is far from a sufficiency economy. In fact, the baseline consumption of the UK requires 65 hours a week of work per worker! The UK is only able to maintain its high level of current consumption by offshoring a large part of its labour and resource requirements to other countries, predominantly countries in the global South.
While our two basic needs scenarios reduce direct consumption compared to the UK baseline, they do not remove the high indirect requirements of consumption inherent in the UK data, from factors like overseas shipping, advertising budgets, and unnecessary bureaucracy. These inefficiencies lead to high production requirements even in our low-consumption scenarios. Further research is needed to sift these out. Ultimately, basic needs must be met with a fraction of the labour, material, energy, and emissions that they require today.
Overall, our results suggest that limiting consumption to the level of basic needs is likely a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for social and environmental sustainability. Providing a good life for all people requires dramatic improvements in the efficiency of provisioning systems while also limiting consumption to a level of sufficiency. This constitutes a very different path than we are on today.
Access the full article in Global Environmental Change:
The full article may be cited as:
McElroy, C., O’Neill, D.W., 2025. The labour and resource use requirements of a good life for all. Global Environmental Change 92, 103008. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2025.103008.