The Sustainable Consumption Budget (SCB): Prosperity Through Intensity Reduction

This paper introduces the Sustainable Consumption Budget (SCB), a quantitative framework that translates biophysical overshoot into per-capita economic consumption space while explicitly incorporating the technology lever—the reduction of environmental damage per unit of consumption. Building on ecological footprint and carbon-budget lenses, the SCB expresses sustainability as a ratio between current consumption and measured overshoot, yielding a transparent benchmark for what level of consumption is compatible with planetary limits under stated technological conditions. The paper provides a formal model, a fully replicable indicator-based methodology, a dynamic extension including rebound effects, and a distribution-sensitive interpretation that avoids uniform-cap fallacies. A global worked example demonstrates how current world consumption can be mapped into a sustainable interval using public PPP and population data. The SCB is not a welfare threshold but a biophysical consistency benchmark that enables policymakers, researchers, and institutions to align growth, innovation, and equity with Earth-system stability.