What question did this study set out to answer?

To quantify the emissions-reduction potential of individual lifestyle choices in developed countries and assess whether educational materials and government policies promote the most effective actions.

July 1, 2017Environmental Research LettersOpen Access

The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions

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Authors

SWSeth WynesUniversity of British Columbia KNKimberly A. NicholasLund University

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Implication

Quantitative synthesis reveals high-impact lifestyle actions substantially reduce individual emissions in developed nations, indicating major gaps in educational and governmental climate guidance.

Key Points

To quantify the emissions-reduction potential of individual lifestyle choices in developed countries and assess whether educational materials and government policies promote the most effective actions.
Calculated annual greenhouse gas emissions reductions across individual lifestyle choices using 148 scenarios extracted from 39 published sources.
Audited climate change recommendations across ten Canadian secondary school science textbooks and government guidance documents from the United States, Canada, Australia, and the European Union.
Identified four high-impact actions: having one fewer child (mean reduction of 58.6 tCO2e per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e per roundtrip transatlantic flight), and adopting a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e per year).
Observed that widely recommended strategies yield substantially smaller reductions, with recycling four times less effective and switching household lightbulbs eight times less effective than a plant-based diet.
Identified that high-impact actions accounted for only 4% of recommendations across ten Canadian science textbooks, while governmental resources similarly prioritized low- or moderate-impact incremental behaviors.

Cite This Study

Wynes et al. (2017) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/69d8424fd56ca42147d17e07 https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

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Implication

Quantitative synthesis reveals high-impact lifestyle actions substantially reduce individual emissions in developed nations, indicating major gaps in educational and governmental climate guidance.

The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Key Points

Cite This Study

The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions

Discussion

Member takes

Implication

Key Points

Cite This Study

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