IMAGE SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLES PROJECT

The IMAGE Sustainable Lifestyles Project

Global per capita carbon emissions must drastically decrease to reach the 2ºC climate target, with estimates of up to 80% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 from today's lifestyles. Lifestyle solutions are currently missing from our climate models. The IMAGE Sustainable Lifestyles Project aims to address this gap by representing lifestyles measures in global, model-based climate scenarios for advising policymakers on climate change mitigation strategies and actions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the timeline for this project? The project started in 2018 and will finish in 2022.
Is the project open for collaboration? Yes, our project is very open to collaborate, share and incorporate insights to improve the work around quantifying lifestyle changes.
What are the key findings so far from the project? We have published research papers on lifestyle changes in IAMs and presented the content of these research papers.

The Project Team

The IMAGE Sustainable Lifestyles Project is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Utrecht University with the modelling and scenario development expertise, and One Earth and Adelphi with sustainable lifestyle and consumption expertise. To ensure we accurately capture many different perspectives, we also actively engage with key stakeholders and decision-makers around the quantification and modeling of lifestyle changes

MEET THE PROJECT TEAM

Project Insights

From our project so far, we have analysed a broad range of literature around lifestyle changes and quantification methodologies, ranging from environmental psychology to agent-based modelling. As a result, we have:

Identified various frameworks that facilitate how modelers should analyse lifestyle changes, for example, intent- and impact-orientations.
Challenged modelers to look beyond the sectors that could limit how lifestyle changes are captured in models.
Identified trade-offs between different approaches of representing lifestyle changes, from exogenous to fully endogenous.
Broken down the contributions of lifestyle change impacts from the IAMs.

Thus, we are able to analyse how IAMs represent consumer behaviour and identify areas of opportunity to better model lifestyle changes.