Prior work (see Kaivo-oja, Luukkanen and Malaska 2001a and b) identified a three-dimensional framework for sustainability analysis. The dimensions are: production, welfare and environmental stress. These are related (but not identical) to economic, social and environmental sustainability – production and welfare are important aspects of economic and social sustainability while environmental stress is an indicator of environmental sustainability. Roughly, sustainability is currently viewed as requiring improvements along all three dimensions. The thematic analysis refined this to focus on welfare (by linking welfare and economic growth) and environmental stress. This raises two questions:

• ·Can we find trajectories meeting this condition?
• Are there sustainable trajectories in which one or more dimensions stabilise?

A summary of possible paths based on previous analyses is presented in Table 3, in approximately decreasing order of sustainability. The shaded paths were not directly examined.

Table 3: Possible Welfare-Economic growth-Environmental stress trajectories

Three specific scenarios were developed in this theme. The Business-as-usual scenario was a “forward scenario” – the starting point is the present, and the values of the variables are unfolded by using an information system based on trends or other assumptions concerning the development of the driving forces. The Factor 4 and Factor 10 scenarios adopted a normative or backwards scenario analysis approach starting from future targets or landing places and reasoning backwards to the present.

The BAU scenario
The construction of forward scenario needs assumed time series for three driver variables. The rest of the variables are calculated according to the ASA information system logic . The drivers selected for the BAU scenario are change rates of GDP, CO2 emission intensity (CO2/GDP) and population.
The results indicate that gross rebound effects pose significant sustainability problems in the EU. The likely scale of dematerialisation cannot counterbalance the gross rebound. As expected in the case of the EU, the partial rebound effect of increased standards of living is more problematic than that from population growth.

Factor 4 and Factor 10 sustainable growth scenarios
Various prior analyses have indicated the need to reduce environmental stress in its different forms. It is customary to reduce the issue of reducing environmental stress through dematerialisation to resource productivity. Thus one may equally well claim that advancing sustainability requires a mean dematerialization rate of 2%/yr, or a 2.7–fold increase in resource productivity in 50 years. The Factor 4 and Factor 10 catchwords have become familiar in sustainability discussions. Such a Factor 4 or Factor 10 scenario is not necessarily ASA-sustainable or not; this study considers only sustainable scenarios. The drivers are; (1) the ASA-sustainability condition that growth not exceed the maximum level consistent with non-increasing environmental stress, (2) the landing place target, i.e. 4-fold or 10-fold improvement in resource productivity, and (3) the targeted time period for the landing place , which determines the starting point of the backwards scenario calculations.