Sustainable + equitable living: are we all on the reality page?
(and if not, how do we turn it…)
We are familiar with positive visualizations of towns and cities powered by green energy and reduced car use, but climate campaigns are over-optimistic about what equitable living at 1.5°C might look like in terms of shifts in consumption for the world’s relatively wealthy. It means radical reductions in material consumption, but what might we be gaining? Are we all truly on board for the recalibration of consumption this implies?
The Compass Festival: Setting the agenda on sustainable + equitable living is a collaborative, interactive event for a limited number of practitioners, researchers, and funders working at the cutting-edge of ambition on sustainable and equitable lifestyles. The festival will help create a shared compass: an ambitious statement of beliefs that helps set the agenda and direction for our work on sustainable and equitable living.
The festival is inspired by recent reports on sustainable and equitable living, including the recent UN Emissions Gap Report Chapter 6 on the role of equitable low-carbon lifestyles, which brought mainstream attention to the need for radically reduced consumption, especially by the more affluent parts of society.
- The 1.5°C global goal necessitates household consumption of 0.7t per person, with an equity basis by 2050, and 2.5t per person by 2030.
- Consumption emissions are unequal within countries and between countries: the top 10% of income earners generate nearly half of global emissions; the top 1% of income earners is estimated at 15% of global emissions—more than double that of the bottom 50%.
- Systemic change is required, including transformational policy progress that creates the social and technical infrastructure for sustainable living, as well as civil society and institutional leadership in shifting norms and practices.
The festival will have two parts: in May we will converge on a guiding compass, or baseline of ambition and commitment, that will enable us to elevate our work on sustainable living into the mainstream climate discourse with the highest level of ambition and clarity.
On June 29, we will converge on two or three action areas for collaboration, including taking the sustainable and equitable lifestyles work deeper into mainstream climate policy processes.
The event is invitation only.
