What is sufficiency, and what does it mean for business?

This explainer introduces sufficiency (meeting everyone's needs while using as few resources as we can) and explores what it means for jobs, businesses and human rights.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines sufficiency policies as “a set of measures and daily practices that avoid demand for energy, materials, land and water while delivering human well-being for all within planetary boundaries”. In a nutshell, meeting everyone's needs while using as few resources as we can.

This can sound common sense: whether you own a toothbrush or your company owns a cement mixer, you want to get as much use out of the one you have before buying a new one. Yet, when we zoom out, things become more complex, as increased sales are the foundation of most companies’ business models.

Sufficiency asks how a company can stay viable while the total volume of material moving through the economy goes down. This explainer sets out what the idea means, why it matters for human rights, and what it would take to pursue it without creating new harms.

Efficiency means getting the same result from less resource input: a lighter box, a more stackable design, a more economical engine. Businesses are already quite good at this, as it generally reduces costs without the need to overhaul a business model or supply chain.

The problem is that efficiency gains are often absorbed by volume growth. Over the last 50 years, as products have become more efficient and cheaper, the daily resources used globally have skyrocketed from 30 to 106 billion tonnes, far outpacing population. 

Circularity - keeping products and materials in use rather than discarding them - is part of the solution. Sufficiency, however, looks at the global scale: what is the total volume of resources used? And it asks the systemic question: not how to make each unit better or how much of it can be reused, but how many units are needed?

The need for a two-tiered approach

Any conversation on sufficiency must start by recognising global inequality. Johan Rockström's planetary boundaries and Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics framing are great starting points, as they highlight that certain demographics and countries are far exceeding their fair share of resource use, while others are far below the social foundation. 

In the housing sector, this means recognising that 2.8 billion lack adequate housing, while millions of buildings in wealthy countries sit underused. In agriculture, acknowledging that in 2022 over 1 billion meals were wasted each day, while 783 million people were affected by hunger. 

Sufficiency demands a two-tiered approach: those exceeding planetary boundaries must reduce the resource consumption associated with their activities, freeing up the resources for those who consume much less than their fair share to meet their social foundation.

Researchers list the following actions: 

• Curbing demand through education and consumer engagement, 
• Making products that last longer, avoiding built-in obsolescence, 
• Focusing on satisfying 'needs' rather than promoting 'wants', 
• New revenue models, and 
• Innovative technology solutions.

For many companies, implementing these will not be easy. Remaining profitable while reducing sales will often require alternative business models: longer relationships with customers, offering repair and refurbishment, or a price premium that a durable product can command.

Some companies, however, are already doing it. 

Fairphone builds repairable modular phones and reports that its devices last nearly twice the industry average, with 40% of Fairphone 3 handsets still in use seven years after launch. It also pays living wage bonuses to workers in its supplier factories, indicating durability and labour standards can be pursued together through a deep understanding of one’s supply chain.

Fashion has often been the antithesis of sufficiency, maximising sales volumes at all cost. Yet last year, Vinted – a second-hand clothing website – became France’s top clothing retailer by sales volume, with global annual sales reaching €10.8 billion.

In Scandinavian countries, it’s common for those living in multi-familial apartment blocks to share laundries and even guest apartments so that each family doesn’t need their own spare room for visitors. And Libraries of Things are emerging in many global north countries where residents can borrow or rent seldom-used items like drills and DIY tools, rather than buying their own – practices that are well established in the global south. 

In the construction sector, companies like Madaster and Concular are issuing material passports and insuring re-used materials. In Bergen’s Inclusion Centre, the contractors were challenged to reuse as many materials as possible, resulting in a reuse index of 64% and reducing the potential blind spots in material sourcing, where human rights violations often lie. 

From a human rights perspective, extracting fewer materials means reducing the land that is degraded by mining and the well-recognised associated issues of free, prior and informed consent and forced labour.

Upon initial consideration, it may appear that sufficiency inevitably means fewer jobs, yet this is not necessarily the case. To reduce extraction, products should be treated like material libraries: storing the materials for a certain number of years, before they can be reassembled into another product. The associated activities are often more labour-intensive than producing new products. They are also harder to automate, as most of us have experienced when trying to repair a watch, bike, or toilet flush. 

In the construction sector, sufficiency means prioritising retrofit over new builds. The European Commission's Renovation Wave strategy found that energy renovation of buildings creates 12 to 18 local jobs per €1 million invested, making it the largest generator of jobs per million euros invested of any sector. In the technology sector, it means prioritising repairs over new manufacturing; in clothing, mending and tailoring over new factories. Globally, the ILO has estimated that working towards a circular economy would destroy 71 million jobs and create 78 million, a new increase of 7 million.   

Of course, this transition will bring disruption: these new jobs will often be in different places from the ones they’re replacing or require different skills. This is at the core of IHRB’s work on a just transition, including in the built environment.

For companies that are shifting supply chains to include more reuse and recycling, due diligence remains paramount: mapping where materials are coming from and where they are ending up. Between 15 and 20 million people work as informal waste pickers in developing countries, often in incredibly hazardous conditions: exposed to toxic materials, with documented child labour and excessive working hours. Company leaders should consider the leverage they have to formalise work in this sector, ensuring existing workers are brought into the process rather than being displaced. 

The EU is the most active jurisdiction. Its Right to Repair Directive, adopted in 2024, covers repair within a reasonable time and at a reasonable price, access to spare parts, and the removal of software and contractual barriers to repair. However, Member State transposition has been patchy, with the strongest obligations only applying to products already covered by EU repairability rules, such as phones, washing machines and fridges. 

The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation is now in implementation, with a 2025-2030 working plan prioritising textiles, furniture, tyres, mattresses, iron and steel, and aluminium, and introducing digital product passports carrying data on durability, repairability and material composition. Building renovation passports, introduced by the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, are the first step on the journey for the construction sector. 

Looking at the future, it’s clear that businesses that are already preparing for sufficiency will be best positioned to meet future requirements.

Most companies are already monitoring their emissions and must ensure their reporting goes beyond emissions per unit to include absolute material and energy use.

The business model is likely where there is most potential for change. Can revenue be decoupled from sales volume? Designing for longer life, making spare parts available and providing repair guarantees could warrant a price premium. The potential for lease models can be investigated while building in-house repair capacity, or the business model could be completely overhauled. After working on the Bergen’s Inclusion Centre, the demolition contractor reflected: “We sold a lot of reusable materials, showing the market wants used building materials – something we thought belonged in the future. As a result, we realised we could develop from a demolition contractor to a reuse contractor”.

When exploring your transition, go back to the doughnut: whose consumption are you seeking to curb? Are they already consuming more than what they need or not? 

Whatever your approach, make sure it’s underpinned by due diligence. This means mapping reuse, repair and recycling supply chains, which involve workers, many of them informal, who are frequently invisible in supplier audits. And make sure this includes those who may lose out from the change, from demolition crews in Europe to plastic waste sorters in Indonesia: without their involvement, the transition to a sufficiency business is destined to fail.