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

  • Published on February 4, 2022

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.

This paper estimated carbon footprints of average consumers in five target countries, including Finland and Japan, for nutrition, housing, and mobility domains based on the collected national and other official statistics, such as nutrition intake and food supply, transport and fuel consumption, housing and water supply, and energy statistics. The paper mainly used estimation based on physical amounts of consumption, which has greater accuracy for calculating carbon emissions, compared to the traditional estimation based on monetary values, albeit limited literature on that. 

The results of the authors’ analysis showed that there are significant gaps between the current lifestyle carbon footprints and the carbon footprints targets at 2030 and 2050, and showed the need that our current carbon footprints have to be greatly reduced if we want to achieve both targets. This paper examined two more developed countries (Finland and Japan), and three less developed countries (China, India, and Brazil), and the current average lifestyle carbon footprints of all five countries greatly exceed the 2030 (2.5 to 3.2 tCO2e/capita/year) and 2050 (0.7 to 1.4 tCO2e/capita/year) targets. In a bid to keep the global temperature rise within 1.5 oC, drastic and rapid reductions in lifestyle carbon footprints of 60–80% by 2030 and 80–90% by 2050 in more developed countries and up to 40% in 2030 and at least 20% to over 80% in 2050 in less developing countries are required.

Another contribution of this paper to a sustainable lifestyle was the suggestion of sustainability-enhancing individual choices and how they reduce average lifestyle carbon footprint. This paper listed and examined numerous choices that potentially reduce lifestyle carbon footprints. The most effective options include private travel without a car, shifting to renewable electricity, electric cars, vegetarian diets, and vehicle efficiency improvement (potential of each option if fully implemented: 500 kg to over 1500 kg CO2e per capita on average). Other effective options include ridesharing, living close to the workplace, temperature control using heat pumps, commuting without a car, use of dairy product alternatives, low-carbon proteins, and living in smaller spaces (250–500 kg CO2e per capita). This paper also examined the aggregate impacts of the adoption of these individual choices on lifestyle carbon footprint reduction. According to the paper, achieving the 2030 lifestyle carbon footprint reduction target will require a very high adaption of all of the suggested lifestyle change choices, while even full adoption of all choices is not sufficient to achieve the lower 2050 target (0.7t).

Lastly, this paper suggested three future research directions to better incorporate decarbonized lifestyle into the framework of carbon footprint reduction, including subnational analysis of lifestyle carbon footprints and lifestyle changes, Integration of lifestyle carbon footprint analysis with living lab approaches (i.e., an open innovation, a participatory platform with real-life environments to address societal challenges through the collaboration of various stakeholders), and developing consumption‑based mitigation scenarios and roadmaps incorporating lifestyle changes.

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