Wednesday, February 22, 2012

[EQ] Sustainable Lifestyles: Today's Facts & Tomorrow's Trends

Report:

Sustainable Lifestyles: Today’s Facts & Tomorrow’s Trends

SPREAD Sustainable Lifestyles 2050

Julia Backhaus, Sylvia Breukers, Oksana Mont, Mia Paukovic, Ruth Mourik

UNEP/Wuppertal Institute Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production (CSCP)

Wuppertal. Germany – 2012


Available online PDF [160p.]
at: http://bit.ly/xnUjwX

 

 

“……….a synthesis of research, leading policy and practice, and stakeholder views on potential pathways toward sustainable lifestyles. The purpose of this report is to provide the necessary background information to support the SPREAD social platform participants in creating a holistic vision of sustainable lifestyles in 2050 and recommendations for a plan of action.

Because of the significance of housing, transport, food, health and society, this report focuses on these key domains. It aims to better understand the relationships between lifestyles, the conditions that frame those lifestyles, and the resulting sustainability impacts in Europe today and into the future. In addition, it identifies promising practices from across Europe that have the potential to be examples of sustainable ways of living of the future. Existing visions, scenarios

and roadmaps for more sustainable futures – from policy, research, business and civil society perspectives – are also examined in detail.

 

“…..·         What makes a lifestyle sustainable?

      ·         How to make sustainable lifestyles mainstream?

·               How can we encourage positive trends to ensure a better future usage of our scarce natural resource base (including energy)?

The report delivers concrete examples of initiatives, such as the increase of solar water heaters (to 75% on Malta), car and bike-sharing initiatives, local food chains, urban farming, eco-villages and travel agencies offering stay-cations. The report also shows how these initiatives can benefit increased health and wellbeing and highlights key elements in order to mainstream and upscale current examples of sustainable lifestyles.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution as to how to motivate people to behave and live more healthy and sustainable. Successful initiatives are those that try to understand how to motivate and enable behavioural change among different groups of people. It is also important to make sustainable lifestyles easy, convenient, accessible and enjoyable. This requires the development of appropriate infrastructure (e.g. to encourage walking and cycling) and context-specific solutions (e.g, communal rental bikes in Paris, Barcelona, London)……….”

Main themes in this report

1. Unsustainable lifestyle trends in Europe: Food, housing and mobility as sustainability hot spots

2. Trends toward sustainability: Promising practices and social innovation

3. Influencing behaviours: Understanding diversity, context-dependency and enabling change

4. Enabling environments: Infrastructure, innovation and multi-level, multistakeholder change processes

5. Policy solutions: Fostering prosperity and healthy, sustainable ways of living

 

 

Executive Summary

Trends towards sustainability: promising practices and social innovation

Influencing behaviours: understanding diversity, contextdependency and enabling change

Enabling environments: infrastructure, innovation, economy, research and policy

Introduction

Unsustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns

Lifestyles and the international agenda

Lifestyles and the economy

Lifestyles, political and business agendas

Sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns

What are sustainable lifestyles ?

Lifestyles

Sustainable lifestyles

Global megatrends and European lifestyles

Population trends and urbanisation

Climate change and health

Economic growth, jobs, time and well-being

Accumulation of “stuff” and marketing

Technological and social innovation

Where are current trends leading us?

Challenges and opportunities for sustainable lifestyles

Consuming

Living

Moving

Health and society

Emerging themes for sustainable lifestyles

SPREADing sustainable lifestyles

Understanding people, their behaviour and motivations to change

Diverse and tailored options for more sustainable ways of living

Innovation, infrastructure and enabling environments for resilient lifestyle change


A framework for change

Defining strategies to mainstream sustainable practices

Changing norms and values

Overcoming lock-ins at the system level

Managing multi-actor and multi-level transitions

From theory to practice and small-scale to large-scale change

Policy initiatives for large -scale changes

Global level policy initiatives

EU level policies

National policies

Policy instruments for sustainable lifestyles


Roadmap and research initiatives for large -scale changes

Scenarios and roadmaps

Research


Conclusions

 


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