This post is a summary of my recent article, which is published online at the Journal of Cleaner Production (Laakso, S., Lettenmeier, M., Household-level transition methodology towards sustainable material footprints, Journal of Cleaner Production (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.03.009).  The actual article contains all the references omitted here for readability. 

As we all know, the use of natural resources has been growing for decades and —under the business-as-usual conditions — it’s expected to keep rising. As a result of this growing use, resource availability has declined dramatically.

To use natural resources sustainably, we must use fewer resources more efficiently. The sustainable level of natural resource use has been estimated at around eight tonnes of material resources per person per year. In Finland this would mean five-fold reduction compared to the present level of resource use (40 tonnes per person per year). So far, however, attempts to encourage sustainable consumption have not advanced significantly and household consumption continues to grow. This failure is due mostly to simplistic behavioral assumptions that overlook the socio-cultural aspects of daily practices. Existing infrastructure and prevailing services determine a basic level of resource use that exceeds sustainability limits even among minimum income receivers in an industrialized country such as Finland.

In our study, we develop a transition-based methodology for studying how the use of natural resources can be reduced to more sustainable level. The methodology follows the steps for transition management proposed by Loorbach (2007) and Loorbach and Rotmans (2006, 2010), and shifts the approach to household-level. The main steps of the methodology are:

1) assessing the problem by calculating material resource use (or material footprints) for participating households,
2) developing household-specific visions in the form of roadmaps,
3) having participating households conduct experiments, and
4) learning and upscaling together with different stakeholders.

In other words, our study covers the entire Transition-Enabling Cycle of Schneidewind and Scheck (2012):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We applied the methodology the first time in Jyväskylä, Finland in 2014 in the ‘Future Household’ project coordinated by the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra. The project started in spring 2014 with interviews, continued in autumn with measurement period and experiment period and ended with interviews in November.

A central part of the project was a workshop in which participants co-created ideas for reducing their natural resource use on the basis of their material footprint results from the measurement period. The workshop applied backcasting as a method: the sustainable eight tonnes level consumption target was set at 2050, and 2030 was chosen as the halfway point from the present to a sustainable level. The households developed ways to reduce their material footprints through both behavioral and systemic changes. On the basis of these ideas, each household created a roadmap detailing measures and pathways towards halving their material resource use — and then they tested these ideas in practice during the one-month experiment period. These experiments varied from energy consultancies to vegan diet and giving up a car.

After the period of experiments, the households and the project team, together with infrastructure providers, service providers and municipal servants, discussed the experiences and results from the project. In this ‘future workshop’, ways of overcoming the barriers for sustainable lifestyles were brainstormed to find out possibilities for mainstreaming sustainable solutions.

Before the experiment period, the material footprints of the households varied from 20 to 69 tonnes per person per year. During the study, all households succeeded in dropping their material footprints considerably towards their roadmap targets. The reductions were from 30 to 55 % from the starting point. From households’ perspective the experiments succeeded well and participants mostly felt they had managed to change their everyday routines to be more sustainable, and considered the support and knowledge from the experts helpful. Households shared their experiences with colleagues, friends, and relatives and felt that they had acted as a positive example in their circles of acquaintances.

The results show that achieving a significant absolute reduction in the material footprint of consumption is possible by making relatively few changes in the consumption practices of households. The results also show, however, that achieving sufficient reductions requires co-operation between end-users and product and service suppliers. In the context of the Future Household project, with a small number of households and a surrounding already interested in solutions for the absolute reduction of resource use, the first application of the methodology succeeded well. For the generalizations of our approach and the results of its first application, however, more projects and studies on household consumption need to be conducted.

 

References:

Loorbach, D., 2007. Transition Management: New Mode of Governance for Sustainable Development. International Books, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Loorbach, D., Rotmans, J., 2006. Managing transitions for sustainable development. In: Wieczorek, A.J., Olshoorn, X. (Eds.), Understanding Industrial Transformation: Views from Different Disciplines, Environment & Policy, 44. Springer, Netherlands, pp. 187-206.

Loorbach, D., Rotmans, J., 2010. The practice of transition management: examples and lessons from four distinct cases. Futures 42, 237-246.

Schneidewind, U., Scheck, H., 2012. Zur Transformation des Energiesektors : ein Blick aus der Perspektive der Transition-Forschung. In: Servatius, H.-G., Schneidewind, U., Rohlfing, D. (Eds.), Smart Energy e Wandel zu einem nach- haltigen Energiesystem. Springer, Heidelberg, pp. 45e61.