Abstract
Low-carbon lifestyles are key to climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and keeping the Earth in a safe operating space. Understanding the global feasibility and drivers of low-carbon lifestyles requires large scale data covering various countries, demographic and socioeconomic groups. In this study, we use the audience segmentation data from Facebook’s advertising platform to analyse the extent and drivers of interest in sustainable lifestyles, plant-based diets in particular, at a global level. We show that formal education level is the most important factor affecting vegetarianism interest, and it creates a sharper difference in low-income countries. Gender is a strong distinguishing factor, followed by national gross domestic product per capita and age. These findings enable upscaling local empirical studies to a global level with confidence for integrated assessments of low-carbon lifestyles. Future studies can expand this analysis of social media audience data to other consumption areas, such as household energy demand, and can also contribute to quantifying the psychosocial drivers of low-carbon lifestyles, such as personal and social norms.
Highlights
Low-carbon lifestyles, comprised of sustainable choices in various consumption areas from food to energy, are considered a key mitigation option to tackle climate change [1, 2]
We consider the fraction of Facebook audience interested in low-carbon lifestyles as a proxy for the spread of this phenomenon in each country where Facebook penetration is relatively high, and as a cross-country comparison indicator
Our findings showed that the fraction of Facebook audience interested in vegetarianism in a country positively correlates with the average meat consumption per capita, implying that a wider interest in vegetarianism in a country does not lead to a lower meat consumption
Summary
Low-carbon lifestyles, comprised of sustainable choices in various consumption areas from food to energy, are considered a key mitigation option to tackle climate change [1, 2]. Achieving the full potential of lifestyle change requires widespread societal transformation. The feasibility of this transformation and how it can be facilitated is yet unknown, because lifestyle change is a complex phenomenon driven by various social, economic, cultural and psychological factors. Quantitative scenario analyses that explore the contribution of lifestyle change to climate mitigation and sustainable development urgently need to address this complexity. The lack of large scale data about the societal heterogeneity of pro-environmental consumption behaviour hinders such quantitative integrated analyses on the feasible potential of lifestyle change
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