The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions
By S. Wynes, Kimberly A. Nicholas. Environmental Research Letters, 2018
397 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Current anthropogenic climate change is the result of greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere, which records the aggregation of billions of individual decisions. Here we consider a broad range of individual lifestyle choices and calculate their potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries, based on 148 scenarios from 39 sources. We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less). Though adolescents poised to establish lifelong patterns are an important target group for promoting high-impact actions, we find that ten high school science textbooks from Canada largely fail to mention these actions (they account for 4% of their recommended actions), instead focusing on incremental changes with much smaller potential emissions reductions. Government resources on climate change from the EU, USA, Canada, and Australia also focus recommendations on lower-impact actions. We conclude that there are opportunities to improve existing educational and communication structures to promote the most effective emission-reduction strategies and close this mitigation gap.
Subfields: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/796ef1f83de407360a1a4ddac704576b17b61cba
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Feasible Options for Behavior Change Toward More Effective Ocean Literacy: A Systematic Review (2019, background): “The most important activities in this context are living car free; flying less; eating fewer animal-based products, in particular meat and cheese; using low-carbon transport; heating less and with green energy only; voting for “green” policies; and promoting and campaigning for a low-carbon future (”
- Viewpoint – Ocean Plastic Pollution: a convenient but distracting truth? (2019, neutral): “However, recent work has indicated that switching to a more efficient car and buying green energy are some of the only technological solutions with major carbon impacts, and switching light bulbs to energy efficient bulbs has only a low impact on carbon output of a typical home [37].”
- The limits of transport decarbonization under the current growth paradigm (2020, methodology): “Still, despite lifestyle changes have in theory a great potential for reducing energy consumption and GHG in the transportation sector, to date model implementations are scarce and have not fully tested the most radical options proposed in the literature to avoid such as living car-free, shifting ma”