Photographs by Juha-Pekka Huotari, City of Lahti
Authors: Niklas Mischkowski (ICLEI Europe); Nina Rilla and Mari Hukkalainen (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd)
How to support changes in lifestyles to significantly drop carbon footprint?
Finnish cities have been experimenting with a vision of sustainable living with different tools. It is critical for cities wishing to act on lifestyles to show policy commitments and investments towards infrastructure and city services that make the transition to 1.5-Degree lifestyles convenient and cost neutral for residents.
“1.5 Degree Lifestyles Puzzle” was used to help households and other stakeholders understand what changes they need to make in their lifestyles to significantly drop their carbon footprint. Individual carbon footprints were calculated at the project start and the development was monitored over time.
The puzzle has triggered additional tools. For example, PSLifestyle -project has developed personal sustainable lifestyle plans that provide a lifestyle management tool. This app holds the potential to reach a large part of the EU’s population. The first versions of the app had already been used over one million times and continued to attract approximately 8.000 monthly visitors. Within 2 years the Finnish experiment reached 2.000 people that committed to over 40.000 actions, potentially affecting a reduction of 6.150 tonnes of CO2eq. The PSLifestyle project aims to upscale this potential in eight European countries leading to over 570.000 tonnes CO2eq savings annually. Learn more: https://pslifestyle.eu/about/project
An innovative approach
Gamification aspects of a smartphone app make 1.5 Degree Lifestyles personal. It further holds potential to reach large numbers of individuals and can influence values and norms (i.e. normative institutions) that are adhered to in the public. Experiments in 3 cities invited participants to use an app to plan changes in their lifestyle that would bring their carbon footprint close to 2.5 tonnes CO2eq (average in Finland: 10 tonnes CO2eq).
Key lessons are to adapt the message of 1.5 Degree Lifestyles to different types of audience and use different channels for different contexts
Of the main barriers in changing lifestyles are persisting norms and values
Sources:
- Lettenmeier, M., Akenji, L., Koide, R., Amellina, A. Toivio, V. (2019) 1.5-degree lifestyles: Targets and options for reducing lifestyle carbon footprints – A summary. Sitra studies 149.
- https://talkofthecities.iclei.org/key-learnings-for-cities-to-enable-1-5-degree-lifestyles/