Lifestyle carbon footprints and changes in lifestyles to limit global warming to 1.5 °C, and ways forward for related research

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for assessing lifestyle carbon footprints and lifestyle change options aimed at achieving the 1.5 °C climate goal and facilitating the transition to decarbonized lifestyles through stakeholder participatory research. Using data on Finland and Japan it shows potential impacts of reducing carbon footprints through changes in lifestyles for around 30 options covering food, housing, and mobility domains, in comparison with the 2030 and 2050 per-capita targets (2.5–3.2 tCO2e by 2030; 0.7–1.4 tCO2e by 2050). It discusses research opportunities for expanding the footprint-based quantitative analysis to incorporate subnational analysis, living lab, and scenario development aiming at advancing sustainability science on the transition to decarbonized lifestyles.

Assessing Lifestyle Transformations and Their Systemic Effects in Energy-System and Integrated Assessment Models: A Review of Current Methods and Data

“…Moreover, decomposition techniques have recently been employed to break down future changes in carbon emissions between baseline and lifestylebased mitigation scenarios to the effects of activity, structural-change, energy-intensity, and fuel-mix parameters (e.g., [24,65]). Table 2 also includes results from articles included in the review employing other large-scale models, such as lifecycle and input-output analysis (e.g., [66]) to further support our conclusions. * This behavioral option mostly relates to non-CO 2 (methane) emissions from landfills.…”

Too much consumption or too high emissions intensities? Explaining the high consumption-based carbon footprints in the Nordic countries

“…The consumption-based carbon footprints have been extensively utilized for studying the opportunities for emission reductions via lifestyle changes, particularly in the recent years (Jones and Kammen 2014, Vita et al 2019, Ivanova et al 2020, Koide et al 2021a, 2021b. These studies have quantified the reduction potentials associated with numerous lifestyle changes (e.g.…”

Toward sustainable development: Connecting systems thinking competency and carbon footprint knowledge

“…Fourth, short-term voluntary efforts will not be sufficient to reach the severe reductions needed to achieve the 1.5 C goal. By setting 1.5-degree lifestyles as an objective, major efforts in all sectors of society are needed, and then consumers' actions also play a major role (Akenji et al, 2021).…”

“…Typically, consumption-based accounting measures the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) produced by a person's activities including indirect emissions and is defined as his or her personal carbon footprint or combined to a household carbon footprint. To achieve a 1.5-degree lifestyle, the average consumer emissions per person (goods, services, food, housing, and transportation) in a developed country should target 2.5-3.2 tCO 2 eq by 2030, compared to contemporary levels of 7.5 tCO 2 eq in Japan and 10.4 tCO 2 eq in Finland (Koide et al, 2021). In the European Union (EU), only 5% of households live within climate targets, with carbon footprints below 2.5 tCO 2 eq per capita (Ivanova & Wood, 2020).…”