Reply to Second comment on ‘The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions’
By S. Wynes, Kimberly A. Nicholas. 2017
310 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In their comment piece, Laycock and Lam (Environ. Res. Lett. 13 068001) focused on the importance for reducing emissions of actions beyond individual choices and overconsumption, and raise the issue of family planning as a human right. Here we respond that both individual and collective actions, in private and professional life, are important to reducing emissions to near zero in the next few decades. While we do not argue that individual actions will be sufficient to achieve this profound transformation, we believe that they can be helpful towards this goal, and also note from our own observations that we see personal, professional, and collective actions as often mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory. Regarding overconsumption, we reiterate that our study was designed to illustrate the decisive role that consumption patterns play in driving greenhouse gas emissions, based on the understanding that wealthy, high-carbon individuals are responsible for a disproportionately large share of emissions. Regarding the ethics of family planning, we fully agree with Laycock and Lam (and international agreements) that family planning is a private decision. We give examples of our careful public communication around this issue to provide this context and thank them for the opportunity to do so. In their comment piece, Laycock and Lam provide insight into the discussion of high-impact climate actions, especially concerning the effect of communicating about family size. Here we respond to their thoughts on the scope of our research, including (1) the importance of actions beyond the private individual level, (2) the importance of overconsumption to an individual’s emissions and (3) the ethics of communications pertaining to the planning of family size.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75ea31f762f931c7aa01b262892eef55769510b9
How researchers see this paper
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In Global and Planetary Change
- M. Sandberg
- J. Barrett
- D. Ivanova
- Holli-Anne Passmore
- Felix Creutzig
- Dominik Wiedenhofer
- M. Callaghan
In Sociology and Political Science
- Miles Richardson
- M. Sandberg
- D. Ivanova
- A. Hunt
- Holli-Anne Passmore
- Felix Creutzig
- Dominik Wiedenhofer
Citations in the corpus
- Sufficiency transitions: A review of consumption changes for environmental sustainability (2021, background): “Though some work has been conducted to calculate this reduction potential (e.g., IGES et al., 2019; Laakso and Lettenmeier, 2016; Wynes and Nicholas, 2017), further quantitative analyses of how various sufficiency practices can reduce ecological footprints would bolster the sufficiency literature.”
- The green care code: How nature connectedness and simple activities help explain pro‐nature conservation behaviours (2020, background): “Items in this block were drawn from a variety of existing measures assessing pro-environmental behaviours (e.g. Markle, 2013) and recommendations for reducing one's impact on the environment (e.g. Holth, 2017; Wynes & Nicholas, 2017).”
- Quantifying the potential for climate change mitigation of consumption options (2020, background): “Examples include opting for electric vehicles (transport) [58], plant-based diet (food) [30, 55] and renewable energy (housing) [30].”