Are we ready for sustainable consumption? apparently not yet...

It is stating the obvious: if we want to tackle major challenges with regards of environmental changes and resource depletion, we'll need to change our consumption patterns dramatically. The World Economic Forum just released its annual report about sustainable consumption -based on an extensive survey and discussions with plenty of CEO's- and the results are not so positive...
More with Less: Scaling Sustainable Consumption and Resource Efficiency

Some highlights:

• The adoption of sustainable consumption is higher in emerging markets, lagging in mature markets (45% of Chinese respondents are willing to pay a 5-10% premium for green products... in Europe 72% of respondents said to be willing to buy green products, but only 17% actually did so in past month);
• There's some discrepancy between good intentions and actual behavior... the US spent 409$Billion in subsidies to assist fossil fuel consumption in 2010;
• Limited growth in environmental innovation... between 1999 and 2009, only 2.7% of patent submissions were for environmental innovation;

Obviously much more needs to be done... in the first place: 'decoupling' economic growth from environmental degradation, which actually comes in 2 forms:

• Resource decoupling: reducing the resources needed to generate a unit of GDP;
• Impact decoupling: reducing the negative environmental impact of producing a unit of GDP.

We're seriously lagging in both, according to the report...

The report also shows that consumption is still mainly driven by cost factors rather than sustainability arguments... maybe this is due to the economic crisis, but chances are that people still lack the awareness of some global issues.

The full report can be downloaded here.
For a brief intro to the report, see this video: