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Reduce Greenhouse Emissions With Four Actions

IOP Publishing
This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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Bridgestone Tires Issues New Sustainability Goals for 2050-giving compass
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Governments and schools are not communicating the most effective ways for individuals to reduce their carbon footprints, according to new research.

Read more about climate change on Giving Compass

Published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the study from Lund University, found that the incremental changes advocated by governments may represent a missed opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions beneath the levels needed to prevent 2°C of climate warming.

“We found there are four actions that could result in substantial decreases in an individual’s carbon footprint: eating a plant-based diet, avoiding air travel, living car free, and having smaller families. For example, living car-free saves about 2.4 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, while eating a plant-based diet saves 0.8 tonnes of CO2 equivalent a 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.

Our results show that education and government documents do not focus on high-impact actions for reducing emissions, creating a mitigation gap between official recommendations and individuals willing to align their behaviour with climate targets. Focusing on high-impact actions (through providing accurate guidance and information, especially to ‘catalytic’ individuals such as adolescents) could be an important dimension of scaling bottom-up action to the transformative decarbonisation implied by the 2 °C climate target, and starting to close this gap.

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.

Read the source article on iopscience.org

Visit GivingCompass.org for related resources on energy reduction

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Since you are interested in Environment, have you read these selections from Giving Compass related to impact giving and Environment?

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    Trinity to Lead €12m European Project Bringing Nature to Cities

    Trinity will spearhead a €12m EU project, “Connecting Nature” which will develop man-made, nature-focused installations, such as the creation of urban woodlands and roof gardens, to make European cities greener urban spaces. Funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, the project will use 11 European cities to implement the solutions the research produces and monitor their success. Using engineering to produce nature-based solutions, the project addresses issues such as air pollution, unsustainable urban development, climate change and natural disasters. The leader of the project, Dr Marcus Collier, an assistant professor in botany in the School of Natural Sciences, said in a press statement, that the project “will attempt to achieve what no other Horizon 2020 project has before”. Collier emphasised the scale and effect the research could have on cities in Europe: “It will co-create city-wide master plans to scale out nature-based solutions and generate funding for them. This is not just about building climate resilience.” Read the full article at University Times


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