GreenWay

The connection to what an individual can do in a ‘bigger than themselves’ context is something that we want to continue to understand

Project Team:

Marcelo Cummins, Mir Gayas Ali, Matt Grover.

Our goal was to create “a perfect hierarchical list” of most impactful actions that an individual can take by making effective changes in their personal lifestyle and also actions that individuals can take which can be effective in influencing that person’s sphere of influence in their broader community.

We researched current lifestyle action resources to understand current recommended solutions and sough to rank these various actions by effectivity. We surveyed close to 300 people on their relationship to climate change, barriers to habit changing and interest in doing more. We confirmed our hypothesis that many people through a lack of education focus on lower effective actions rather than the big game-changing lifestyle actions. We also confirmed that a lot of resources available e.g. government/green website communicate poorly the hierarchy of actions and overwhelm users with a list of too many things to do.

The connection to what an individual can do in a ‘bigger than themselves’ context is something that we want to continue to understand as the collective individual actions are not enough in comparison to bigger sectors of the economy in terms of C02e output. It became quite messy to understand the links between where an individual can influence an entity outside of themselves be it their workplace, their government or local community. Also, the connection between an individual’s lifestyle choices and how this flows into macro demand trends for bigger sectors is something to be further understood.

To understand the concept of ‘effective actions’ in a lifestyle context, people should read this article (and/or this article as well) to appreciate the spread in impact that certain actions they take can have on the environment and thus focus more attention/energy on the bigger impact activities.