The US NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) identifies a number of specific resource and environmental effects to estimate when considering actions. Perhaps this will help:

https://ceq.doe.gov/docs/get-involved/Citizens_Guide_Dec07.pdf

Other related terms/entities should be that of:

-carbon dioxide capture and sequestration

-carbon dioxide abatement

-linking "carbon leakage or life-cycle burden" with "carbon cycle in nature diagram"

Dear Geoffrey

Regarding your comment on the rebound effect, I believe that it is too general because it depends on the activity that generates it.

You can have effects on air, water, and soil.

In air contamination, there are many undesirable effects. Such as:

· Contamination by CO2, NOx, SOx, Particulates, etc., that have a high effect on people's health, affecting the pulmonary system and affecting, by corrosion, buildings and structures, even stone and concrete, and deteriorating machinery. Of course, contaminants such as CO2 and CH4, as well as fluorocarbons, affect the world atmosphere

· In water contamination rivers are victims of its effects, killing aquatic life, reducing waters areas by eutrophication, and turning water unusable for any activity, even for irrigation.

· Soil contamination, often the consequence of oil exploitation destroys macrobian activity including humus formation and others

· Anthropogenic activities like logging, produce erosion that in some cases are the reason for mudslides that can cause the death of thousands of persons as happened in Venezuela, decades ago. Logging also impacts the ecosystem by reducing the amount of oxygen needed for humans and animals, and by restricting the absorption of CO2, and then, increasing the temperature of the planet, and the melting of poles

Kindly have a look at this paper

Article Indirect rebound effects on the consumer level: A state-of-t...

Thank you Nolberto Munier for your extensive answer. Impacts human activities have on nature are of many different kinds and your comment illustrates how complexe and numerous they are.

At the same time it makes me realize that my question is not precise enough. Let me explain it a little bit further here and then I'll make some adjustements in the statement. My question does not relate to the types of impacts but rather to the mecanics - usually unexpected by the (benign) originator - that lead to an increase of them.

Here are some definitions:

• Rebound effect: illustrates how an increase in efficiency can generate a higher than expected use of resources (Figge & Thorpe, 2019)
• Carbon leakage: describes a shift of CO2 emissions from a region with emission constraints to an unregulated area (Naegele & Zaklan, 2019)
• Burden shifting (2 types): (1) occurs when considering only parts of the whole life cycle of a product or (2) worsening an environmental problem by mitigating another.

What I am looking for is a typology of these kind of mecanics which would be called indirect effects in the US NEPA as per William F. Hansen ("caused by the action and are later in time or farther removed in distance, but [...] still reasonably foreseeable"). Maybe I should change the expression "undesirable effect" for "unforeseen effect" or "side effect"?

Thank you, Geoffrey

It appears that I did not interpret correctly your question

Hi Geoffrey,

Since last we saw each other I've been working on expanding the idea of stewardship. If we apply the planetary boundaries framework to all existing sustainability concepts - ZW, CE, SMM etc., we can reframe all those frameworks as massive rebound making approaches simply because existing approaches focus on propping up business as usual of growing consumption as a route to "sustainability" (eco-efficiency or incremental and marginal change).

The BaU premise is wholly shallow and inherently set up to create rebounds and undesired effects. To me something cannot be "sustainable" if it carries with it enormous ecological, societal, human suffering and discounting more-than-human life. These are known issues in material networks. Perhaps the notion of rebounds and undesirable effects need questioning.

Your image "unforeseen environmental effects" feels odd to me as it seems to assume that the system is balanced and the eco-efficiency efforts are meant as corrective measures (e.g., for rebounds). But, in reality, that is far from the lived experience of people and places in the material extraction, processing, production and discard networks. Current "sustainability" framings are not willing to address these planet level consequences, not to mention the diminishing of life forms themselves (including people with lesser means).

As for "unforeseen" - I struggle with the terminology because the whole point of systems thinking or life cycle thinking is to "foresee" these so called externalities. If after 5 decades of systems thought we still don't see the same things the we didn't see at the beginning, then something might be wrong with our apparatus.

I don't think I answered your question, perhaps muddled it a bit.

m

Dear Minal Mistry ,

I am glad to read you. I see that your inspiration on sustainability issues has not left you, much to my delight! Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic which, in my opinion, is extremely important.

Regarding growth, it does seem that sustainability-related concepts which aim to preserve the status quo, or an economic model based on growth, tend to exacerbate all kinds of rebound effects. It is indeed an economic mechanism that is often highlighted in the literature. However, some rebound effects are of a psychological nature and can also appear in a process of sufficiency, i.e. when the consumer choose to consume less thanone resource and then allows himself to consume others... (thank you Kiprotich Kiptum for your reference;). Therefore, I'm not sure about the exclusive nature of the relationship between growth and rebound.

I also agree with you on the inaccuracy of the term "unforeseen", because what was considered un-assessable a few decades ago is effectively no longer today (e.g., LCA), and with the sophistication of assessment tools, what is not assable today will be tomorrow (eg hybridization etc ...) - thank you Minal for taking the reflection a step further - The question is not so much to distinguish what is predictable from what which is not in an "absolute" perspective, but rather in the perspective of the decisions that are likely to be taken. For example, when a consumer has the choice between 2 products with equivalent environmental impact but at different prices, he will rationally tend to buy the cheaper product in order to save and spend elsewhere ... ultimately leading to an increase in his environmental footprint. There is perhaps here an insurmountable limit of what can be considered as “unforeseen”, e.g., the possibility for the consumer to be informed about the carbon footprint of what he consumes, or rather “unavoidable”, e.g., consuming.

Beyond the semantic questions on the rebound effect, which are essential you are right to remind Minal, my question can be summarized in a much simpler way: do we know of other similar mechanisms observable only by sophisticated tools used by researchers and that traditional tools alone cannot see?

What a great discussion! Thanks, Geoffrey for asking that important question! During our project on collaborative consumption, I think it is not an understatement to say that we struggled a lot regarding semantics! While semantic is, after all, just semantic, I think it is, however, very critical in this case.

If the goal is to make sure we move toward a more sustainable direction (and maybe it means giving up on growth), then we need to assess all potential social and environmental impacts and come up with solutions to avoid them. [Note that I omit the economic pillar of sustainability because, as mentioned above, maybe the solutions should be harmful to our current economic system (however, we have to stay cautious as social and economic wellbeing can be correlated (a slow and thoughtful degrowth could enhance our social wellbeing, not so sure about a sudden collapse of our current economic system)]. Then it's a matter of properly accounting for all potential social and environmental impacts including those from what we can call "unforeseeable effect" for now. That's where semantics matter: we need to know what method can properly account for what type of unforeseeable impacts and that implies naming those impacts. This is also important to avoid double counting some of those impacts.

Now, I think there is a bit of confusion in this discussion regarding what a traditional LCA can do. Yes, it can account for burden-shifting (from one life cycle stage to another, or one type of environmental impact to another), but needs more refinements for other types of unforeseeable effects. If we want to account for burden-shifting from environmental to social impacts (think biofuels), then we will need LCSA. If we want to account for impacts occurring outside the LCA product system (i.e., its life cycle, from cradle to grave) we need consequential LCA or hybrid LCA (i.e., input-output & LCA) to account for impacts from the whole economy that our product systems (as we often compare several systems) cause. And like you said if we need to know what impacts occur because the consumer thinks "I stopped eating meat, I am already making an effort to have a more sustainable life, so it's okay, today I can take my car rather than the bus", then we probably need a psychology model in addition to LCA. (And so on with probably most of the other types of unforeseeable effect we can come up with). So yes, we've come a long way with LCA and system thinking, but practically, we are often still far from accounting for everything in our assessments (because it is so complex!). Even when doing hybrid-LCA, which can account for the entire global economy, we are still missing the informal economy (just a few trillion $...). Behaviors may change suddenly (a great example is what's happening currently with covid) and so one psychological mechanism creating impacts may not be valid anymore (if we take the example above in a covid context, "I stopped eating meat, I am already making an effort to have a more sustainable life, I don't commute anymore because I work at home due to covid, so it's okay, I can treat myself and take the plane for a vacation abroad (if travel's allowed!)"). So again, it is extremely difficult to account for all impacts occurring in different scenarios.

There is also some caution to take when talking about the rebound effect. It's not a synonym to backfire, so it does not necessarily negate all the benefits of efficiency improvements. Sometimes a rebound effect can also be positive for the environment (e.g., if a consumer has more money because of a lower electricity bill due to improved thermal insulation, he may decide to spend that gain in purchasing the same number of products but of higher quality, for instance, organic food instead of conventional food, a more durable car or purchase new products but with negative carbon footprints (e.g., purchase trees for their garden)). While I agree that the problem is complex, I am not sure we can just say "rebound effect will always negate all improvements we are trying to make, no matter what we do".

So proper semantics, and identifying possible "unforeseeable effects" when designing new products/solutions (and maybe we would need a better name and a clear and rigorous definition for unforeseeable effects) is I think critical to i) choose proper methods, ii) account for as much potential social and environmental impacts as possible, and iii) avoid double-counting (as two combined methods could be assessing the same impacts (e.g., in the case of hybrid-LCA where most proposed methods have mechanisms to avoid double-counting)). It is also crucial to have semantics properly characterizing each of those unforeseeable effects (e.g., based on their causal mechanisms), again, in order to avoid double-counting! (A change of behavior described by a psychological model and a re-spending effect described by an economic theory may give different explanations of a causal mechanism but account for the same unforeseen effect (and so applying both models at the same time to evaluate impacts would not make sense)).

As for the original question:

-Warm glow (also called moral cleansing, guilt reduction): feeling good about an action believed to be sustainable although it may not actually be the most sustainable one. (Doorn & Kurz 2021)

-Pro-environmental behavior spillover: Maki et al. 2019 provide an elegant and succinct definition: "When people engage in a first pro-environmental behaviour (PEB1; for example, conserving energy at home), are they more or less likely (positive and negative spillover, respectively) to engage in other pro-environmental behaviours (‘PEB2’; for example, conserving water at home)?" (Maki et al., 2019).

-Boomerang effect (I think I have seen it used as a synonym of the rebound effect, thus the importance of proper semantics!): based on subjective norms - where consumers realize that their peers consume more (or behave worse) and begin increasing consumption (or behave worse) (Wynes et al., 2018).

-Rebound effects are sometimes called ripple effects.

-Not strictly an unforeseeable effect but regroup some of the effects identified in psychological studies: self-licensing = the way people feel psychologically licensed to act. The consequence is: people are more likely to behave in ways they can justify easily. (Parguel et al., 2017). (Again, it can relate to the sort of mental balance we have regarding how sustainable are each of our activities ("I can let myself do this because I have done that")).

Hope that helps rather than further muddy the waters.