IMAGE Sustainable Lifestyles Project

Governments around the world have set climate targets, but how do they achieve them? This project helps include sustainable lifestyle changes into the popular IMAGE climate model as one of the ways governments and other actors can advance their climate goals. The project also develops compelling visions of future sustainable lifestyles to support dialogue among policymakers about the role of lifestyle changes in mitigating climate change. The project is a multi-disciplinary collaboration led by Utrecht University with the modeling and scenario development expertise, and the sustainable lifestyles leadership and policy and community engagement skills of OneEarth and Hot or Cool Institute and participatory scenario planning and graphic design expertise of Strategic Design Scenarios.

IMAGE is an ecological-environmental model framework that simulates the environmental consequences of human activities worldwide. It represents interactions between society, the biosphere and the climate system to assess sustainability issues such as climate change, biodiversity and human well-being. The objective of the IMAGE model is to explore the long-term dynamics and impacts of global changes that result from interacting socio-economic and environmental factors.

The IMAGE Sustainable Lifestyles Project aims to address the under-representation of lifestyle changes in global, model-based scenarios for advising policymakers on climate change mitigation strategies. The project combines information from detailed studies on consumer behaviour and global mitigation models – by translating the outcomes of detailed studies into scenario inputs for the integrated assessment model IMAGE. 

The analysis estimates the environmental impact of sustainable behaviour using model studies in order to engage IPCC and decision-makers. By improving the representation of lifestyle changes in the model, it will provide a more realistic indication of the mitigation potential, the role of different actors, and the rate at which strategies can be implemented. Together with the stakeholders of this project, the project intends to improve understanding and communication on the possible impact of sustainable consumption patterns – both to show the effectiveness of lifestyle change-oriented strategies and to use their feedback from action experiments in further improving the scenario set.

Project publications include: 

• Improved modeling of lifestyle changes in Integrated Assessment Models: Cross-disciplinary insights from methodologies and theories, Nicole J. van den Berg, 2019
  
• Alternative pathways to the 1.5°C target reduce the need for negative emission technologies, Detlef P. van Vuuren, 2018
  
• Interactions between social learning and technological learning in electric vehicle futures O Y Edelenbosch, David L McCollum, 2018
  
• Exploring the implications of lifestyle change in 2 °C mitigation scenarios using the IMAGE integrated assessment model, Mariësse  A. E. van Sluisveld, 2018

Find out more: https://www.iamsustlifestyles.com/project-content.html