Resources

The Think Piece series publishes short, policy-relevant contributions on ideas that are not yet widely explored, intended to push the frontier of policymaking and inform public discussion on emerging perspectives on sustainability transition. In this instalment by Anna Coote, Principal Fellow at the New Economics Foundation (NEF), we take a closer look at Universal basic services (UBS).

This report shows current trends in fashion consumption, in particular fast fashion, cannot be maintained if we aim to achieve a fair and just transition to climate neutrality.

The Policy Brief, Enabling Sustainable Lifestyles in a Climate Emergency offers insights into what forces shape our lifestyles, from our values and norms to economic factors and government regulations, underpinned by the physical infrastructure within which we live. 

This first instalment in the Hot or Cool Think Piece series shows that climate disruption and biodiversity collapse are two symptoms of the environmental crisis caused by ever-growing resource consumption. Multiple overshoots of Earth’s planetary boundaries have pushed our natural systems close to or even beyond critical tipping points.

Some countries have been more successful than others at dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. When we explore the different policy approaches adopted as well as the underlying socio-economic factors, we note an interesting set of correlations: countries led by women leaders have fared significantly better than those led by men on a wide range of dimensions concerning the global health crisis.

The concept of ‘wellbeing economy’ (WE), that is, an economy that pursues human and ecological wellbeing instead of material growth, is gaining support amongst policymakers, business, and civil society. Over the past couple of years, several national governments have adopted the WE as their guiding framework to design development policies and assess social and economic progress.

Despite widespread recognition of the need to transition toward more sustainable production and consumption and numerous initiatives to that end, global resource extraction and corresponding socio-ecological degradation continue to grow.

While women were already doing most of the world’s unpaid care work before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, emerging research suggests that the crisis and its subsequent shutdown response have resulted in a dramatic increase in this burden.

We present an alternative approach to estimating the spatial footprint of energy consumption, as this represents a major fraction of the ecological footprint (EF).

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 the potential impacts of reducing carbon footprints through changes in lifestyles.

The concept of 1.5-degree lifestyles involves changes in household consumption for achieving levels of per person carbon footprint compatible with the 1.5°C target of the Paris Agreement (IPCC, 2018). This policy brief shares findings from the project implementation in the six cities involved, including policy recommendations for enabling 1.5-degree lifestyles.

In recent years, the fast fashion industry has emerged as one of the most polluting worldwide, contributing be­tween 4 and 10 per cent of global CO2 emissions along its value chains, and generating wide environmental and social negative impacts, including microplastic release, water pollution, and unsafe working conditions.

In a world with a limited and fast-shrinking global carbon budget, coupled with vast inequalities, how do we allocate the remaining carbon allowance in a manner that is fair while drastically decreasing our footprints within a limited time frame to avoid irreversible ecological damage? The 1.5-Degree Lifestyles: Towards A Fair Consumption Space for All, addresses this question head-on.

Recent studies show that behaviour changes can provide an essential contribution to achieving the Paris climate targets. Existing climate change mitigation scenarios focus on technological change and underrepresent the possible contribution of behaviour change. This paper presents and applies a methodology to decompose the factors contributing to changes in per capita emissions in scenarios.