Fostering 1.5 Degree Lifestyles with Urban Partnerships

Discussions on sustainable living often revolve around a few behaviours that can reduce the negative impacts to the environment, such as adoption of veganism, avoidance of flight, and reduction of plastic use. While such measures are essential, it must be recognised that for lifestyles to be truly sustainable, actions must be taken across the whole spectrum of food, housing, mobility, goods, services and leisure, which account for over 75% of lifestyle carbon emissions.

In transitioning towards sustainable lifestyles, one might legitimately ask what is the indicator of a sustainable lifestyle? Or how much carbon footprint we shall reduce.  Our research on 1.5 Degree Lifestyles has tried to answer some of these questions by identifying the globally unified carbon footprint targets that can contribute to the ongoing global efforts in limiting global warming below 1.5 °C. According to the study, we should save the average carbon footprint to 2.5 (tCO2e) in 2030, 1.4 by 2040, and 0.7 by 2050. The current global average is estimated to be 4.6 tCO2e.

Moreover, our previous work identified that individual carbon footprints among and within countries can vary significantly.

Cities, where consumption and production intersect, are prime leverage points for enabling 1.5 °C lifestyles. The ‘Envisioning Future Low-Carbon Lifestyles and Transitioning Instruments (Future Lifestyles Project)’,  led by IGES in collaboration with partner agencies identified city-specific sustainable living options in Cape Town, Kyoto, Nonthaburi, New Delhi, Sao Paulo and Yokohama. Through workshops and household experiments, researchers and residents of these cities (project participants) discussed feasible and desired sustainable lifestyle options that can be adopted immediately, as well as those that require adequate supporting measures from policymakers and business sector.

The project finds that mutually reinforcing support measures between individual households, governments at different levels, and the business sector can reduce average per capita carbon footprints due to lifestyle.

The potential reduction in carbon footprint can be achieved when governments and businesses provide appropriate support to the households in implementing suggested lifestyle change options effectively, while household awareness and efforts to take actions enable government and businesses to materialise supporting/promoting measures.

In cities such as Cape Town, Kyoto, and Yokohama, it was found that the globally unified target for a 1.5 Degree Lifestyles of 2.5 t-CO2e/capita/year by 2030 cannot be achieved without transformative systemic changes on the production side such as drastic increase of renewable energy share and technological innovation. In addition to provide enabling conditions of lifestyle change actions for citizens, the government and the business sector should take adequate actions to realise systemic changes.

On the positive side, it was observed that many residents of Cape Town, Kyoto, Nonthaburi, New Delhi, Sao Paulo and Yokohama deliberately took actions that reduced their carbon footprint across Food, Housing, Mobility, Goods, Services, and Leisure domains.

For example, the vicious cycle of buying more clothes and discarding more, where over 87% of the total fibre used to manufacture clothes ends up in a landfill or incinerators. A simple but effective action by the project participant from Yokohama, illustrate steps towards sustainable living:

“Children grow up fast, and since they don’t wear their clothes often, they tend to outgrow them in relatively good condition…Buying a dress in good condition from an online auction, I fix the length and let my child wear it. When my child outgrows them, I sell them again through online auctions while enjoying the growth of my child. This is my idea of not wasting clothes.”

Project Participant, Yokohama

Interestingly, the actions that contributed to reducing the carbon footprint were often not motivated by environmental awareness. Actions were motivated by cultural, religious, economic, as well as moral reasons. Although project participants found it refreshing that the carbon footprint potential of their positive actions was quantified and placed in the perspective of reducing global warming and mitigating climate change, it should be emphasised that there is a clear need to identify both environmental and non-environmental factors to communicate the sustainable living message.

“Taking part in the experiment made me focus on my daily actions more than I am already used to.”

Project Participant, São Paulo

To communicate the messages on sustainable lifestyles, it is necessary to combine actions in the areas of food, housing, mobility, goods, services and leisure, in order to foster carbon footprint reduction efforts in the different areas simultaneously. Tools like the sustainable lifestyles options catalogue, could be developed for specific cities and enable governments, business and citizens to identify and introduce contextually appropriate carbon footprint reduction options that fit their personal circumstances and preferences while reducing their overall carbon footprint.

After all, there are different transition pathways towards 1.5 Degree Lifestyles, and collaborative efforts by all stakeholders through participatory approach shall be pursued to ensure effective transition taking account the specific conditions of each city.

Acknowledgement

The findings presented in this blog are from the ‘Envisioning Future Low-Carbon Lifestyles and Transitioning Instruments project’, 2019-2021, funded by the Government of Japan through its contribution to the 10YFP Trust Fund, administered by UNEP. This project is led by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), Japan, in collaboration with Hot or Cool Institute (Germany), the Akatu Institute (Brazil), Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), ICLEI (South Africa), Swechha India (India), ICLEI (Japan), D-mat (Finland), and National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan (NIES).

Source - https://hotorcool.org/hc-posts/fostering-1-5-degree-lifestyles-with-urban-partnerships/