Abstract
Many actions have been undertaken worldwide to cope with climate change and to effectively reach the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Top-down approaches, based on both policies for the development of enabling technologies and incentives to promote their wide applications, have been largely adopted in most of the cases. However, the potential contribution of changes in individual behaviours still represents an underestimated field of improvement, despite many scholars have already evidenced their considerable expected impacts. This paper presents the first outcomes of a study on the role of citizens’ behavioural change in reducing GHG emissions, focussing on the functions and performed activities at household level. Starting from a review of the emerging body of literature on the topic, a map is drafted linking the people’s actions and choices and their most relevant effects on each of the environmental categories they can interact with. The mapping provides a list of suitable practices and lifestyles shifts to be adopted, organized by categories and weighted by their emission potential reduction on the whole households’ carbon footprint. This results in a sort of easy-to-read console allowing citizens to operate according to more informed decisions within their homes, thus accelerating the sustainable transition by bottom-up initiatives.
Highlights
The reduction of Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions still remains one of the primary goals of climate-change mitigation policies at global, national and regional levels, with the aim of redirecting towards this purpose both the economic and productive systems, including strategic sectors such as industry, transportation, agriculture and construction, as well as the management of the involved resources.The built environment accounts for three main GHG emitters: energy, transportation and buildings [1,2], while the most relevant share of energy related GHG emissions is that generated by commercial and residential buildings [2].The huge changes required to shift GHG emissions trends are usually considered under the umbrella of governmental policies at the macro scale
This paper assumes carbon footprint – generally defined as equal to the greenhouse gas emissions generated by a person, organization or product (Johnson 2008) – as an equivalent indicator of CO2 emission, to be gauged in terms of global warming potential (GWP) [5, 6]
This paper explores which interventions are effective in supporting climate change mitigation by individuals and households starting from the identification of the environmental categories which are generally considered for carbon footprint calculations
Summary
The reduction of Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions still remains one of the primary goals of climate-change mitigation policies at global, national and regional levels, with the aim of redirecting towards this purpose both the economic and productive systems, including strategic sectors such as industry, transportation, agriculture and construction, as well as the management of the involved resources (energy, water, materials).The built environment accounts for three main GHG emitters: energy, transportation and buildings [1,2], while the most relevant share of energy related GHG emissions is that generated by commercial and residential buildings [2].The huge changes required to shift GHG emissions trends are usually considered under the umbrella of governmental policies at the macro scale. As the carbon footprint has become widely used as an impact indicator, the effects of individual and collective contributions became more evident and the combined relevance of both elements entered the debate on actions against the threat of global climate change [4] According to these premises, this paper assumes carbon footprint – generally defined as equal to the greenhouse gas emissions generated by a person, organization or product (Johnson 2008) – as an equivalent indicator of CO2 emission, to be gauged in terms of global warming potential (GWP) [5, 6]. Household carbon footprint includes two types of emissions: a) direct emissions related to direct energy use in the houses (such as fuels for heating, electricity) and to fossil fuels for transportation; b) indirect or embodied emissions across flows production as supply chain emissions (i.e. appliances and furniture used in the house) [6, 7]. These are about 60-70% of the carbon footprints of Western households [7]
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