Four Lifestyle Choices Seen as Most Effective in Reducing Greenhouse Gases

Summary

A study by Lund University researchers iden­ti­fied four high-impact actions indi­vid­u­als can take to reduce green­house gas emis­sions, includ­ing eat­ing a plant-based diet, avoid­ing air travel, liv­ing car-free, and hav­ing smaller fam­i­lies. These actions were deter­mined to be more effec­tive than com­monly rec­om­mended prac­tices like recy­cling or using energy-effi­cient light bulbs, and are essen­tial to meet­ing the Paris Agreement’s cli­mate tar­gets.

A study by Lund University researchers in the jour­nal Environmental Research Letters has iden­ti­fied four of the most effec­tive actions indi­vid­u­als can take to reduce green­house gas emis­sions.

The authors of the study, Kimberly Nicholas and Seth Wynes, exam­ined 39 peer-reviewed papers, car­bon cal­cu­la­tors and gov­ern­ment reports, and ana­lyzed a range of indi­vid­ual lifestyle choices and their poten­tial impact on the reduc­tion of green­house gas emis­sions. The find­ings revealed that four lifestyle choices have a higher impact than oth­ers. These include: eat­ing a plant-based diet, avoid­ing air travel, liv­ing car-free, and hav­ing smaller fam­i­lies.

Each of these four actions was deter­mined to be high impact because each reduces green­house gas emis­sions by at least 0.8 tons of CO2-equiv­a­lent per year per indi­vid­ual. The study also iden­ti­fied these actions to be ​“best in class” com­pared to oth­ers because they have the poten­tial to con­tribute to sys­temic change: for exam­ple, if more peo­ple lived car-free, there would be less of a need to build roads and park­ing lots. The researchers applied a life-cycle analy­sis to the actions to assess the emis­sions released from cra­dle-to-grave, tak­ing into account fac­tors like pro­duc­tion, trans­porta­tion, stor­age, pack­ag­ing, etc.

“There are so many fac­tors that affect the cli­mate impact of per­sonal choices, but bring­ing all these stud­ies side-by-side gives us con­fi­dence we’ve iden­ti­fied actions that make a big dif­fer­ence,” said Wynes in Science Daily. ​“Those of us who want to step for­ward on cli­mate need to know how our actions can have the great­est pos­si­ble impact. This research is about help­ing peo­ple make more informed choices.”

An impor­tant part of the study also included exam­in­ing the actions and inter­ven­tions rec­om­mended to reduce an indi­vid­u­al’s car­bon foot­print in gov­ern­ment reports in the EU, USA, Canada and Australia, as well as 10 Canadian high school text­books.

High school text­books were exam­ined because the researchers iden­ti­fied ado­les­cents as an impor­tant tar­get group due to their poten­tial to adopt life-long habits and influ­ence behav­ior in the house­holds they live in. Five text­books rec­om­mended liv­ing car-free, only two sug­gested avoid­ing air travel, and none advo­cated eat­ing a plant-based diet or hav­ing one child less.

As for the advice pub­lished in gov­ern­ment reports, these were judged to be insuf­fi­cient to tackle the Paris Agreement goal of keep­ing the global aver­age tem­per­a­ture increase under 2° C.

Oft-cited rec­om­men­da­tions included replac­ing stan­dard light bulbs with energy-effi­cient ones, recy­cling and buy­ing energy-effi­cient prod­ucts but these prac­tices only result in a low to mod­er­ate impact. The study con­cluded that gov­ern­ment rec­om­men­da­tions tend to focus on ​“incre­men­tal changes with a much smaller poten­tial to reduce emis­sions,” and none of the reports exam­ined men­tion any of the four high-impact actions iden­ti­fied by the study.

The study has deter­mined that eat­ing a plant-based diet (defined as entirely meat-free) is four times more effec­tive than recy­cling while chang­ing house­hold light bulbs to energy-sav­ing ones is eight times less effec­tive.

The study points out that a reduc­tion of 2.1 tons of CO2 per per­son per year is required to meet the Paris agree­men­t’s 2° C cli­mate tar­get by 2050. Here are a few exam­ples of the amount of CO2 saved per action:

• Replacing light bulbs: less than 0.2 tons saved per indi­vid­ual per year
• Eating plant-based: 0.8 tons saved per indi­vid­ual per year
• Avoiding air travel: 1.6 tons saved per round-trip transat­lantic flight
• Living car free: 2.4 tons per indi­vid­ual per year
• Having one child less: an aver­age for devel­oped coun­tries of 58.6 tons per year

“We rec­og­nize these are deeply per­sonal choices. But we can’t ignore the cli­mate effect our lifestyle actu­ally has,” said Nicholas in Science Daily. ​“Personally, I’ve found it really pos­i­tive to make many of these changes. It’s espe­cially impor­tant for young peo­ple estab­lish­ing life­long pat­terns to be aware which choices have the biggest impact. We hope this infor­ma­tion sparks dis­cus­sion and empow­ers indi­vid­u­als.”

• Phys.org


• Science daily