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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.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss with a special attention to Australian cities.

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Human population has introduced wide ranging and often negative consequences for the natural environment. Population stability and decreasing fertility have thus been heralded as promising to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, household size has been decreasing steadily in both developed and developing countries, in 2017, 32.5% of households in the EU consisted of single occupants and almost 46 million Europeans are predicted to live alone by 2025. Globally, intergenerational living is decreasing and one-person households are expected to be the most numerous household type worldwide by 2030. Shrinking household sizes worldwide is one among a myriad of social and economic trends which have been linked to negative carbon consequences, including raising affluence and economic growth, strong reliance on fossil fuels, and urban sprawl, among others. While there might be multiple socio-demographic factors for the size of carbon footprints, this article focuses on the characteristics of small households and their carbon contribution.

The growing number of households is a fundamental challenge to dramatically reducing resource consumption in order to mitigate human impact on the environment and avoid catastrophic climate change. Households make up a major share of global consumption and household dynamics and practices will need to change in order to meet equitable climate targets. The single occupancy trend is paralleled by an increasing demand for more living space for single occupants, leading to an increasing dwelling space per person and more resource use for the construction of residential property. Practices and lifestyles can mean that in two identical houses one’s energy use is three times as high as the other’s. Practices like washing or cooking could benefit of sharing decreasing the resources needed. Thus, the number of occupants has a significant impact on consumption. Despite evidence that decreasing household size has significant sustainability implications, research and policy still emphasise smart technologies and buildings which on its own is insufficient to curb increasing household consumption.

Despite increasing evidence on how various socio-demographics affect carbon footprints and energy use, it is unclear how prevalent these trends are among small households and what their environmental implications are. Small households with single or dual occupants are a heterogeneous group consisting of people with substantially different demographic and socio-economic characteristics which calls for a more nuanced approach to policy. Small households are a growing environmental challenge and thus increasingly relevant for energy and environmental policy, and more research is needed to understand how the characteristics of this cohort affect consumption. The authors chose Denmark for their study due to its specific characteristics – Denmark is promising for informing policy for social and environmental sustainability in understanding global carbon challenges.

Danish single and dual occupant households are responsible for 77% of the carbon footprint and make up 73% of the sample in Denmark. Small households also report higher average carbon footprints compared to large households. Income is one the strongest predictors among single and dual occupant households where a doubling of income results in 48-52% increase in carbon footprints. This supports a clear trend that income is by far the strongest driver of global environmental impacts, dwarfing other factors such as socio-demographics or dwelling structure. There is also a significant effect of a disabled household member resulting in 23-29% of lower carbon footprint – this could be because disabled people in Europe are not able to afford adequate energy services which in turn exacerbates their disability.

The effects across household sizes diverged in terms of population density. While the authors did not find a significant effect of population density for single occupant households, dual households in densely and sparsely population areas have lower carbon footprints than their intermediate-density counterparts. Particularly, two-person households in the suburbs have higher per capita carbon footprints than those in the city. Household consumption also depends on the broader infrastructure that the household has access to which may be why urban households with access to shared infrastructure, like apartments and public transport, tend to have lower carbon footprints. Once people live alone, the tendency is to continue to live alone and so intervening into these high carbon footprint cohorts before they live alone could entail potential in reducing carbon footprints.

The authors suggested that storytelling could be a great way to change such trends. To reconfigure the high energy everyday lives underlying high carbon footprint cohorts, we need to know about not just what people do but have an empathetic feeling for why they do it. Stories facilitate more compassionate and ultimately more effective interventions for sustainability transitions.

As single and dual occupant households are responsible for three quarters of the Danish carbon footprint, policy makers should prioritise on small households rather than traditional two-parents-with-children families as the departure point from which to build climate and social policy. Building sustainability should minimise resources required to provide energy services, like heating, cooling and lighting, per person, rather than per building. At the household level, a key policy area may be how to encourage new forms of share living and downsizing as with co-housing or tiny apartments. While sharing is a clear way of addressing small households, income is also a key consideration in sustainability transitions.

This study illuminates the social-demographic characteristics of carbon footprint cohorts and their consumption categories enabling the design of targeted interventions. By using storytelling, the authors aim to increase empathy and compassion for various carbon footprint cohorts. Workshops are needed with policy-makers to try out number and observation-based storytelling in the real world. Only then will we be able to qualitatively see how useful storytelling is working toward socially and environmentally sustainable futures.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, 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.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. Do you know how big your carbon footprint is?
2. How could you decrease your carbon footprint?
3. What would help you to consider decreasing it?

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