My house, my car, my footprint: A sustainable consumption corridor analysis of Nordic households

This study operationalizes a ‘Corridor Framework’ to study sustainable consumption for the housing-mobility nexus across the Nordic countries. Survey data containing socio-demographic and consumption patterns of 6694 households was used to estimate consumption and consumption-based carbon footprints for these households. Emission and dynamic minimum consumption thresholds were applied from the literature to develop the corridor and applied to the dataset to a distributional corridor analysis. We found a general high level of emission overshoot alongside widespread high achievement above the minimum consumption threshold, in line with expectations for high-income, high-equality countries, though income-based inequalities in consumption and emissions existed. One key finding was that rather than trade-offs between mobility and housing, as income rose, consumption and emissions rose together, likely pointing to needs-satisfier escalation and positional consumption. Second, infrastructural emissions intensities are heterogeneously locking-in a high percentage of household personas, where even at the minimum consumption level, they would still be in a state of emission overshoot. Examples include rural households in Denmark, Finland, and Iceland where 60%+ are locked out of the mobility corridor or urban housing Denmark and Finland 70–80% due to high‑carbon energy sources. Lastly, threshold selection played a large role in these results, and our analysis points to the need to continue the developing research path of developing context-specific minimum consumption thresholds, by persona type, to ensure appropriate application of such thresholds. This approach, and its future refinement, can support sustainable consumption research by enabling deeper investigation of cross-domain trade-offs while accounting for heterogeneous lifestyle requirements across household types.