Presentation
Amidst increasing awareness and growing media attention on individual action and lifestyle changes, it is crucial to understand how these societal aspects can be integrated structurally in the analysis of long-term decarbonisation pathways and included as a core component of debates on policies and actions. This Issue Brief clarifies the challenges and, based on the analysis of foresight exercises, provides conceptual frameworks that can help navigate the issues and structure political discussions.
Key Messages
- Three challenges must be tackled in order to better integrate lifestyle changes into low-carbon pathways:
• Acknowledging the political dimensions of an exploration of lifestyles
• Overcoming barriers to multidisciplinary approaches
• Promoting new methodologies for pathway design
- Addressing these challenges and better integrating lifestyles into the scenarios would bring four benefits to policy discussions based on foresight studies:
• Overcoming the limits of current techno-economic pathways in understanding and implementing the transition
• Exploring new types of transformative decarbonisation pathways that better combine techno- economic changes and social evolution
• Making these pathways more concrete for citizens
• Better integrating of social sciences and social dimensions (inequalities, SDGs) into climate change expertise, discussions and policies
