EE-TRANS
Eating and Energy Use Reconfigured
Growing concerns for climate change call for radical systemic changes in society in terms of both production and consumption. In order to develop the current understanding of reconfigurations required for altering the patterns of production and consumption, EE-TRANS brings together socio-technical transition and practice theories and connects them in a novel way with the analysis of institutional disruptions.
We analyse and compare two transitions-in-the-making: the reduction of meat consumption for a more sustainable food system and energy use in housing and everyday life.
EE-TRANS analyses the emerging transitions in these two systems, and pursues a strong empirical programme in taking the dialogue between socio-technical transition and practice theories further. The novelty of EE-TRANS lies in the integrated approach and the new conceptual openings proposed. The theoretical objective of EE-TRANS is to develop middle-range concepts in understanding how consumption and production are or can be reconfigured or disrupted for sustainability transitions. The empirical objective is to analyse and compare the emerging transitions in energy and food systems and to identify future policy mixes for sustainability transitions.
Project duration: 9/2018 – 8/2022
ENERGISE
European Network for Research, Good Practice and Innovation for Sustainable Energy
From January 2017 to the end of 2019, I worked at the Centre for Consumer Society Research as part of ENERGISE team. ENERGISE is an innovative pan-European research initiative to achieve a greater scientific understanding of the social and cultural influences on energy consumption. Funded under the EU Horizon 2020 programme for three years (2016-2019), ENERGISE develops, tests and assesses options for a bottom-up transformation of energy use in households and communities across Europe.
ENERGISE adopted a Living Labs approach to directly observe existing energy cultures in a real-world setting and to test both household and community-level initiatives to reduce energy consumption. A comprehensive review and classification of household and community energy initiatives from 30 European countries provided the foundation for the development of two ‘ENERGISE Living Labs’ designed to capture influences on individual and collective energy consumption. Data collection before, during and after the roll-out of 16 living labs to eight partner countries was instrumental in contributing to the design and assessment of future energy consumption initiatives across Europe.
ENERGISE’s primary objectives were to
- Move beyond existing sustainable consumption research by developing an innovative theoretical framework that fuses social practice and energy cultures approaches,
- Assess and compare the impact of European energy consumption reduction initiatives,
- Advance the use of Living Lab approaches for researching and transforming energy cultures,
- Produce new research-led insights into the role of routines and ruptures in shifting energy use towards greater sustainability,
- Enhance multi-way engagement with actors from society, politics and industry and effectively transfer ENERGISE’s outputs to further the implementation of the European Energy Union.
The ENERGISE consortium includes seven partner universities as well as research institutes, enterprises and NGOs from Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Slovenia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Our team at the University of Helsinki leads work package 3, ‘Designing ENERGISE Living Labs’. We also produced open-access guidelines and toolkits for living labs approach to disrupt everyday life practices towards sustainability. See also WP3 deliverables, and more information about the living labs in Finland.
Project duration: 12/2016-11/2019
SET
SET project tackles the global disruption of energy markets by creating pathways for Finland to profit from the energy disruption. SET has assembled a database of 100+ Finnish new energy pilots and experiments. A selection of 20 of these examples are developed into case studies on learning in experimentation, to deliver recommendations for public funding and design of experimentation, service and usability design and capacity building. My contribution was in conducting case studies of local climate experiments in Towards Resource Wisdom project (2013-2015) in Jyväskylä.
Project duration: 2015-2020
Sustainability Tracker
A real-time signal system for sustainable consumption!
We are exceeding the boundaries of the Planet. To achieve pathway to the sustainable future, changes are needed in all sectors of the economic activity, such as industry and public services. However, also consumption patterns and behavior of individuals and households play an important role. Household consumption accounts for about 70% of the carbon footprint of Finland. If everyone lived like we do, we would need the resources of over three planet Earths. There is no doubt that something must be done for present lifestyles.
Change of consumption patterns is required to tackle environmental challenges. But it is not easy to change one’s routines and habits. And more harder it gets, if you don’t know how to change them in order to make your lifestyle more sustainable. We need to provide them real-time information on environmental effects of their actions in an easy form. In other words, we have two challenges: routines and signals. The extensive, and existing, data registries of our consumption create new opportunities for developing personalized solutions to follow and get feedback on our consumption choices.
A sustainability signal system, Sustainability Tracker, as a mobile application gives real-time signals on individual consumption behavior and encourages more sustainable consumption choices. A mobile app is easy to use, there’s no need for laborious data entries for any calculators, it is always available, and results are sharable in the social media. We are testing different feedback systems to find the ones that work best
We were developing Sustainability Tracker as part of Helsinki Challenge idea competition. Our team for Helsinki Challenge consisted of experts on environmental sustainability from various fields: Our team leader was Kaisa Korhonen-Kurki. Kaisa is a Research coordinator at Helsinki University Center for Environment, HENVI. Janne Hukkinen is a Professor of environmental policy at the Department of Social Sciences. Senja Laakso is Doctoral researcher at the Department of Environmental Sciences. Her research interests are related to social and material barriers for adopting sustainable practices in Finnish households, as well as integrating studies on social and environmental sustainability. Janna Pietikäinen is a University lecturer at the Helsinki University Center for Environment, HENVI. Marja Salo works as a researcher in the Finnish Environment Institute, Centre for Sustainable Consumption and Production. She is a specialist in climate effects of household consumption and a developer of the Climate Diet -net service. Leo Stranius works as an executive director at the Finnish Nature League. We are working together with our partners: Helen, Finnish Environment Institute, Taito United, Elisa, and Helsinki University Alumni Association.
Helsinki Challenge idea competition ended in November 2015. We are still planning to continue with Sustainability Tracker in the future. The Sustainability Tracker web page can be found here!
Project duration: 8/2014-11/2015
Get rid of your car
We give you a travel card
Most of the carbon emissions of transport are from road transport and it also consumes the most energy. We need to find ways to encourage people to reduce driving alone in their cars and increase walking, cycling, use of public transport, car sharing, ride sharing and economic driving.
Encouraging people to make smart travel choices using various means of guidance is called ‘mobility management‘. Mobility management can include, for instance, making services easier to use together with the users.
In the project Get rid of your car (Luovu henkilöautosta), City of Jyväskylä gave ten households travel cards for the deed of conveyance of a car. Households committed themselves to not having a car during the six-month project. During this time, households reported on their experiences, and this feedback was used for development of public transportation services in Jyväskylä area. The project was part of a larger Bussiloikka pilot to improve public transport in the city.
This way, new customers are encouraged in trying new modes of transport and making more sustainable choices. The project is coordinated by the City of Jyväskylä. A summary of the article I wrote about the project can be found here.
Project duration: 1/2015-6/2015
Image from the project flyer.
Future Household
Future Household -project seeks ways for more sustainable living
The use of natural resources has been constantly growing during the last decades. According to Global Footprint Network’s calculations, it would take 1.5 Earths to produce the renewable ecological resources necessary to support humanity’s current Footprint. In order to sustain the prevailing Finnish lifestyle, we would need the resources of almost three and a half planet Earths. When it comes to the total material consumption (which includes both abiotic and biotic resources), most Western countries’ consumption is four to five times higher than the sustainable level. In order to achieve the sustainable level, we need to both consume less and use natural resources more efficiently.
As part of the ‘Resource-wise region’ project module in Jyväskylä, Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra launched the Future Household (Tulevaisuuden kotitalous) -pilot project in 2014. The purpose of the project was to find ways for the wiser use of resources at the household level (unfortunately the project’s website is only in Finnish).
Five households of different size participated in the project. First, they filled in questionnaires and consumption diaries during three-week measurement period. The consumption areas observed are housing, mobility, nutrition, leisure time, tourism and household goods. After that, we calculated the material footprints for each of the households. In the beginning of October, we had a workshop with the households. At the workshop we mapped ways for the households to reduce their material footprints, and households created roadmaps towards sustainable lifestyles for themselves. The next task for the households was to test these different experiments for reducing their material footprint during one-month trial period. Households were interviewed throughout the project, and they also reported on their experiences in social media.
The Household of the Future (Tulevaisuuden kotitalous) -project was coordinated by The Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra and carried out by D-mat ltd. and Big Plans Bakery Think Tank. The final report of the project (in Finnish) is published on Sitra’s web page.
The first article of the project was published online in March 2015. See the summary of the article! See also a summary of the project in Finnish.
Project duration: 3/2014-2/2015
Image: Roadmaps in process.
Back to basics: basic security and consumption
Is life on the basic security sustainable?
I worked as a research assistant at Finnish social insurance institution’s (Kela) research department in 2011. I was a member of a small research group coordinated by Tuuli Hirvilammi. Our aim was to develop a research method for integrating the measurement of natural resource use with well-being research. I wrote my Master’s Thesis ‘Is life on the basic security sustainable? Environmental space as framework for studying ecologically and socially sustainable consumption‘ as part of the project.
In my Master’s Thesis I discuss about consumption from the perspective of ecological and social sustainability. The environmental space concept works as the framework for my study. The environmental space concept was developed in the beginning of the 1990’s. It is a space that can be defined with different indicators and within which it is possible to live a decent and socially acceptable life and at the same time consume natural resources in a sustainable way. In this research the upper limit of environmental space is defined as the sustainable level of natural resource use calculated as material footprint and the lower limit as decent minimum reference budgets that illustrate the level of consumption allowing a household to fulfill all basic needs and to participate in society.
The material of the study was collected by questionnaires and interviews on the consumption and lifestyle of the participating households. The households interviewed were all single and living on disability pension or basic unemployment allowance. The natural resource consumption of the households was calculated as material footprint. The material footprint is based on the MIPS concept (Material Input per Service Unit) that considers the whole life cycle of products and activities. The participants were also asked to report their income and consumption expenditures. We were also discussing about consumption, the social pressure to consume and use of natural resources.
The results show that the low-income households have an average material footprint exceeding the ecologically sustainable level (18 100 kg per year), although the material footprint is lower than average (40 500 kg per year). The results also indicate that a sustainable level of resource use cannot be achieved solely by individual choices but the society must improve the changes in the supply of products, services and infrastructure, enabling households to consume in a more sustainable way.
The income level of the households remains below the level of the decent minimum reference budgets. The participating households experienced poverty as lack of possibility to consume and recognized the prevailing social pressure to consume. Consuming was characterized by pursuit of status and social comparison between people. The change in prevailing consumer culture is an essential part on the way towards sustainable society, because the amount of consumption grows as long as welfare is measured through consumption.
The connection between consumption and natural resource use remained unclear to many of the households and attitudes towards nature alternated between the households. Those households that had been low-income for their whole life, hadn’t thought about the sufficiency of natural resources. Their more ecological way of living than average is rather compulsory than their own choice. The rise in their income level would lead to increasing consumption, as households would want to raise their standard of living by moving to a bigger house and travelling. When we notice the limits of the Planet, we should pay more attention to the upper limit of the environmental space to those, who consume the most.
Our study was a part of the research project aiming to study the adequacy of minimum income in Finland. The research project ‘Back to Basics: Basic income and Consumption’ was funded by the Finnish Academy for the years 2009–2012. The research sites were Finnish social insurance institution, University of Helsinki, National Consumer Research Centre, and National Institute for Health and Welfare.