Listen to the episode:

You can find the transcript through this link.

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Are you interested in small footprint living?

Our summary today works with the article titled Small is beautiful?Stories of carbon footprints, socio-demographic trends and small households in Denmark from 2021 by Tullia Jack and Diana Ivanova, published in the Energy Research & Social Science journal.

This episode is a great preparation for our next interviewee, Colin Chee in episode 117 talking about small foot print living with its advantages and disadvantages.

Plus, since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how household size is connected to carbon footprints. This article presents different Danish cohorts and opportunities to decrease their footprints with storytelling and policy-making.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Humanity is increasingly living in single or double occupant households but these lifestyles add greatly to our negative impacts on the environment.
2. Storytelling could be a way to help people understand their possibilities in decreasing their carbon footprint in an empathetic way, working toward socially and environmentally sustainable futures.
3. Policy-makers need to take into account the change in lifestyles and create requirements for city dwelling to be more sustainable in single and double occupant households.

You can find the article through this link.

Abstract: Shrinking household size is a key challenge for sustainability, simultaneously decreasing sharing and increasing resource consumption. We use the Danish Household Budget Survey and carbon intensities from EXIOBASE to characterise small households in socio-demographic cohorts along the carbon footprint spectrum. Single and dual occupant households represent 77% of the Danish carbon footprint and 73% of the sample, making these households highly relevant for climate and social policy. We identify high carbon footprint cohorts to determine potential intervention targets such as wealthy males living alone and couples in suburban areas. To add emotional depth to these characteristics we provide three stories to our results. Illuminating characteristics of high impact households provides a foundation from which to design and implement interventions to reduce the carbon consequences of the growing trend towards living alone. We also characterise low carbon footprint cohorts, with specific focus on the effects of low income, disability, energy poverty, and population density. Our study makes an original contribution using storytelling, a step in the direction of increasing empathy and compassion for the various carbon footprint cohorts and working toward socially and environmentally sustainable futures.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• No.027 – Interview with Professor Richard Manasseh talking about more sharing opportunities;
• No.117 – Interview with Colin Chee talking about small footprint living;

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