Abstract

The aspirations, motivations and choices of individual European citizens are a major driver of the future of global, European and local land use. However, until now no land use study has explicitly attempted to find out how the general public wants to live in the future. This paper forms a first attempt to survey European citizens to understand their desired future lives in relation to consequences for European land use. We used a crowdsourcing experiment to elicit visions from young Europeans about their lives in 2040. Participants completed a graphic novel around carefully selected questions, allowing them to create a story of their imagined future lives in pictures. The methodology worked well, and the sample seemed reasonably representative albeit skewed towards an educated population. In total, 1131 responses from 29 countries were received. Results show a strong desire for change, and for more sustainable lifestyles. There is desire for local and ecologically friendly food production, to eat less meat, to have access to green infrastructure and the ability to cycle to work. However, international travel remains popular, and the desire for extensive food production and owning detached houses with gardens will likely result in complex land use trade-offs. Future work could focus more specifically on quantifying these trade-offs and inform respondents about the consequences of their lifestyle choices. This was a first attempt to use crowdsourcing to understand citizen visions for their lives in the future, and our lessons learned will help future studies improve representativeness and increase responses.

Highlights

  • Until now no land use study has explicitly attempted to find out how the general public wants to live in the future

  • Results show a strong desire for change, and for more sustainable lifestyles

  • The characteristics of the respondents, based on the questions asked in the survey, appear reasonably representative in comparison with European Union (EU) summary statistics

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Summary

Introduction

Land system science has made major progress in understanding land use change (Rounsevell et al 2012) and has highlighted the need to manage natural capital to ensure a continued provision of ecosystem services (Bateman et al 2013; Lawler et al 2014), including climate regulation (Stone 2009), sustainable food provision (Branca et al 2013; Harvey and Pilgrim 2011; Smith 2013) and the preservation of our cultural (Beilin et al 2014; Palomo et al 2014) and natural heritage (Gimona et al 2015). Individual aspirations, motivations and choices are a major driver of future global, European and local land use. Given this knowledge, it is surprising that comparatively little land use research has focused on obtaining a better understanding of individual citizens’ desires for their future lives. Until now no land use study has explicitly attempted to find out how the general public wants to live in the future

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