Strategies towards sustainable households using stakeholder workshops and scenarios (original) (raw)
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Strategies for Sustainable Households
… Symposium on Sustainable …, 1999
Meeting the needs of present generations while ensuring that future generations can fulfil their needs properly requires sustainable development. Assuming that in the next 50 years the global population will double and global wealth will increase fivefold, while it will be necessary to halve the environmental burden, social needs will have to be fulfilled twenty times more environmentally efficiently by 2050. It requires great changes in consumption and production in the 'developed' part of the world. This is the starting point of the EU-funded research project 'Strategies towards the Sustainable Household -SusHouse' focusing on what households can contribute to such Factor 20 strategies. This paper describes the participatory approach of the SusHouse project, focusing on the key elements of stakeholder workshops and scenario construction, and presents first results for the household functions (areas) (Clothing Care, and Shopping, Cooking and Eating) studied in the Netherlands and the UK. It is concluded that it is possible to construct scenarios for future sustainable fulfilment of household functions based on the creative ideas and visions of stakeholders from different societal groups attending workshops. The paper ends with a discussion of the relevance of the applied methodology in the field of sustainability research.
Futures-the Journal of Forecasting Planning …, 2002
A high factor environmental efficiency improvement, towards a Factor 20 by 2050 ADneeded due to the assumed doubling of the world population combined with a fivefold increase of wealth per capita and a halving of the total global environmental burden-cannot be achieved through good housekeeping and technological innovation alone; any technological solutions will have to be combined with social innovations, in lifestyles and cultures. This paper describes the conclusions of the SusHouse (Strategies towards the Sustainable Household) Project that has been exploring possible socially and technologically innovative strategies for sustainable households. The Project has covered three household 'functions': Clothing Care, Shelter (Heating, Cooling and Lighting) and Food (Shopping, Cooking and Eating). These have been studied in five European countries (Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands and the UK). The methodology of the Project has involved stakeholder workshops, the construction of Design-Orienting Scenarios, environmental, economic and consumer assessment of the Scenarios and strategy formulation. The paper describes: (1) the methodology for devising design-orienting scenarios, with examples from the three functions; (2) the results of environmental, economic and consumer acceptability assessments of these scenarios; and (3) comments on how the methodology can be developed and applied.
Shopping, cooking and eating in the sustainable household
Brand, E. de Bruijn, T. & Schot, J.( …, 1998
SusHouse (Strategies towards the Sustainable Household) is a EU-funded research project concerned with developing and evaluating strategies for transitions to sustainable households. Three household functions are being studied in the SusHouse project: Clothing Care, Shelter, and Shopping, Cooking and Eating (previously known as Nutrition). With the help of stakeholders from industry, government, universities, and public interest groups, the project will formulate normative scenarios of possible developments of these household functions for the year 2050 focusing on the necessary technological and cultural innovations that contribute to the sustainable household. The scenarios will be evaluated whether they decrease the overall environmental burden, whether they are economically credible and whether they are acceptable to European consumers. This paper will focus on the Shopping, Cooking and Eating function giving some preliminary results of research carried out in the Netherlands which will be compared to the situation in Hungary and UK.
The Journal of …, 2001
To find routes and implement solutions to sustainable development will require relevant stakeholders from a broad range of societal groups to be involved. To create these routes will need radical ideas and profound visions because clearly current systems are not helping society towards sustainable development. This paper describes part of the SusHouse (Strategies towards the Sustainable Household) project which explored possible strategies for creating sustainable households based on a Factor 20 improvement in environmental efficiency by the year 2050. It describes so called 'Design Orienting Scenarios' (DOSs) using the case of 'shopping, cooking and eating' developed in Hungary, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The DOSs were developed from stakeholder creativity workshops with the aim of providing normative heuristic scenarios to illustrate a range of environmental futures, and thereby informing the design, business and policymaking processes. The variety of developed DOSs ensured that alternative futures were compared, each having concrete proposals for product-service systems. This paper also indicates that the methodological approach has potential for application to other research projects and particularly to design processes that aim to generate products for sustainable futures based on interactive stakeholder participation.
Sustainable lifestyles 2050: stakeholder visions, emerging practices and future research
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2014
Global resource use and the associated environmental impacts continue to grow, partly due to the increasing levels of European material consumption. Many policies and strategies for sustainable everyday life have been initiated by governments and businesses, mainly based on technological innovations for reducing environmental impacts of production processes, designing better products, and providing infrastructure for collective services. There is, however, a growing recognition that sustainable lifestyles can be shaped not only through technological innovation, but also through social innovation. Social innovation is an emergent field of academic research and everyday practice that aims to meet social needs more effectively than existing solutions by engaging the power of social actors, stimulating interactions among them and enabling dynamic social processes. Social innovation is often seen as an important contribution to sustainable living at the local level, but only as a niche with little immediate relevance for advancing large-scale societal change at regime and landscape levels. By employing a participatory backcasting approach, the present research challenges this perception and aims to demonstrate the importance of social innovation processes and stakeholder engagement in envisioning the evolution of mainstream sustainable lifestyles from existing and emerging sustainable practices. The paper presents results of a European social platform project, SPREAD Sustainable Lifestyles 2050, which brought together academics, European decision makers, businesses and civil society in order to explore potential visions of sustainable lifestyles in 2050 and identify focus areas for future research.
Education, training, tools and services to enhance sustainable household consumption
2014
Household consumption (housing, mobility, food, goods and services) accounts for about 70% of the carbon footprint of Finland (i.e. greenhouse gas emissions caused by the domestic final use of products). The Final Draft of the IPCC 2014 report on climate change mitigation emphasises the need for diverse actions across sectors that are required to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Changes in human behaviour and consumption patterns are recognised as important parts of the mitigation acts to cut emissions. These changes in consumption are essential also because of the possible rebound effect, i.e. that the technical improvements can be offset by increased consumption. Ecological sustainability of consumption, and especially housing, was the focus of the Finnish Ecohome project. The aim of this project was to help households decrease their energy consumption and carbon footprint. The project consortium identified four main target groups to work with. Professionals and small an...
Tailored advice and services to enhance sustainable household consumption in Finland
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2016
Household consumption (for housing, mobility, food, goods and services) accounts for about 70% of Finland's carbon footprint (greenhouse gas emissions caused by the domestic final use of products). Therefore, climate change mitigation calls for changes in human behaviour and consumption patterns. Opinion polls indicate that Finns are concerned about climate issues; at the same time the carbon footprint of household consumption in Finland is high on a global scale. It is clear that environmentally sustainable behaviour and decisions at the household level require knowledge, motivation and services that support actions. To tackle unsustainable consumption patterns, action models promoting households' environmental sustainability were developed and piloted in Finland. The action research approach was applied to study the process of development and piloting of the action models, with key intermediaries and target groups involved in the process. These action models were designed specifically to help households decrease their energy consumption and carbon footprint. The action models provide tailored feedback and advice to address sustainable consumption from two perspectives: (1) everyday sustainable choices and practices and (2) long-term home-renovation decisions. In the action models, the focus is on the most significant consumption choices. Therefore they also supplement Finland's programme for sustainable consumption and production. The pilot work demonstrates the role of the interactive process and feedback from target groups and intermediaries in significantly improving the action models, the importance of personal contact for supporting household interpretation of numerical data and provision of tailored advice, the role of intermediaries in disseminating research-based knowledge and tools, and that sustainability-based perspectives in the renovation and housingmaintenance sector can provide new and supplementary business opportunities.