Individual action on climate change can include personal choices in many areas, such as diet, travel, household energy use, consumption of goods and services, and family size. Individuals can also engage in local and political advocacy around issues of climate change.
Some commentators have argued that individual actions as consumers and "greening personal lives" are insignificant in comparison to collective action. Others say that individual action leads to collective action, and emphasize that "research on social behavior suggests lifestyle change can build momentum for systemic change." According to respondents to a 2022 survey conducted by the European Investment Bank, climate change is the second most pressing issue confronting Europeans. Over three-quarters of respondents (72%) believe that their individual actions can make a difference in tackling the climate issue.
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| A demonstrator at the People's Climate March (2017) |
Suggested individual target amount
As of 2021 the remaining carbon budget for a 50-50 chance of staying below 1.5 degrees of warming is 460 bn tonnes of CO2 or 11+1⁄2 years at 2020 emission rates. Global average greenhouse gas per person per year in the late 2010s was about 7 tonnes - including 0.7 tonnes CO2eq food, 1.1 tonnes from the home, and 0.8 tonnes from transport. Of this about 5 tonnes was actual carbon dioxide. To meet the Paris Agreement target of under 1.5 degrees warming by the end of the century, it is estimated that the annual carbon footprint per person required by 2030 is 2.3 tonnes. As of 2020 the average Indian almost meets this target, the average person in France or China overshoots it, and the average person in the US and Australia vastly overshoots it. Per capita emissions also vary significantly within countries, with wealthier individuals creating more emissions. A 2015 Oxfam report calculated that the wealthiest 10% of the global population were responsible for half of all greenhouse gas emissions. According to a 2021 report by the UN, the wealthiest 5% contributed nearly 40% of emissions growth from 1990 to 2015.
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| Emissions of the richest 1% are more than twice that of the poorest 50%. Compliance with the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C goal would require the richest 1% to reduce emissions by at least 30 times, while per-person emissions of the poorest 50% could approximately triple. |
The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report pointed out in 2022: "To enhance well-being, people demand services and not primary energy and physical resources per se. Focusing on demand for services and the different social and political roles people play broadens the participation in climate action." The report explains that behavior, lifestyle, and cultural change have a high climate change mitigation potential in some sectors, particularly when complementing technological and structural change.
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| Though total CO2 emissions (size of pie charts) differ substantially among high-emitting regions, the pattern of higher income classes emitting more than lower income classes is consistent across regions. The world’s top 1% of emitters emit over 1000 times more than the bottom 1%. |
Meaning of "lifestyle carbon footprint"
The carbon footprint was originally coined & popularized by the ad campaign Beyond Petroleum in 2004-2006, funded by British Petroleum (BP), for which other have accused them of popularizing to downplay their own culpability.
In 2008 the World Health Organization wrote that "Your 'carbon footprint' is a measure of the impact your activities have on the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced through the burning of fossil fuels". In 2019 the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Japan defined "lifestyle carbon footprint" as "GHG emissions directly emitted and indirectly induced from the final consumption of households, excluding those induced by government consumption and capital formation such as infrastructure." However an Oxfam and SEI study in 2020 estimated per capita CO2 emissions rather than CO2-equivalent, and allocated all consumption emissions to individuals rather than just household consumption. According to a 2020 review many academic studies do not properly explain the scope of the "personal carbon footprint" they study.
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| A vast majority of people surveyed for the European Investment Bank Climate Survey say they are making efforts to reduce their contribution to climate change, but few are making radical lifestyle changes. |
People's Climate Change
The People's Climate Movement (PCM) was a climate change activist coalition in the United States. PCM organized the 2014 People's Climate March and 2017 People's Climate March.
PCM included trade unions, social justice groups, and civil society, environmental, and religious organizations. PCM emphasized the inclusion of underrepresented groups, job creation and economic prosperity.
In 2020, PCM suspended organizing events or updating their social media, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.
History
PCM started in 2014 to organize the People's Climate March in New York and the National Day of Action in 2015. PCM attendees or supporters included the Sierra Club, Sunrise Movement, Alliance for Climate Education, Clean Water Action, Service Employees International Union, and Union of Concerned Scientists, among others.
PCM organized the 2014 People's Climate March, 2015 National Day of Action, 2017 People's Climate March, 2017 "100 Days Mobilization", and 2018 "Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice March". The 2018 march in San Francisco had over 30,000 participants, while organizing several more events throughout the United States.
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| September 2014 People's Climate March |
Ideology
PCM's platform included the following demands: A "100% Clean and Renewable Future", "Economic Opportunity for Everyone", "Prioritizing a Just Resilience, Relief and Recovery", "Union Wages that Support a Family", "Pollution-Free Communities and Workplaces", and "Protection of Workers".
PCM march organizers relied heavily on 2 approaches: "mass mobilization" and "movement alignment". Mass mobilization is the ability to motivate large crowds to converge upon one location with one goal as a unified force. This indicates the importance of the movement and serves as a visual for media coverage of the movement. Social media can enable movements to share information or organize a specific event. Movement alignment can increase one's impact by unifying other groups or social movements that are formally unaffiliated but working towards an identical or similar goal. Movement alignment differs from mass mobilization as it refers to a technique used to unify movements and organizations rather than individuals.
Criticism
PCM was criticized by ecosocialists as symbolic and too friendly to corporations. Chris Hedges argued that real change could come only from "those willing to breach police barricades". The People's Climate Marches were criticized as merely symbolic, with no real plan to address the issues contributing to climate change.
Personal carbon trading
Carbon rationing, as a means of reducing CO2 emissions to contain climate change, could take any of several forms. One of them, personal carbon trading, is the generic term for a number of proposed carbon emissions trading schemes under which emissions credits would be allocated to adult individuals on a (broadly) equal per capita basis, within national carbon budgets. Individuals then surrender these credits when buying fuel or electricity. Individuals wanting or needing to emit at a level above that permitted by their initial allocation would be able to purchase additional credits in the personal carbon market from those using less, creating a profit for those individuals who emit at a level below that permitted by their initial allocation.
Some forms of personal carbon trading (carbon rationing) could be an effective component of climate change mitigation, with the economic recovery of COVID-19 and new technical capacity having opened a favorable window of opportunity for initial test runs of such in appropriate regions, while many questions remain largely unaddressed. However, carbon rationing could have a larger effect on poorer households as "people in the low-income groups may have an above-average energy use, because they live in inefficient homes".
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| Climate change mitigation |
Proposals
Proposals include :
- Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) – devised by environmental writer David Fleming, who first published the idea in 1996 under its former name Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs). The UK's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has been researching this scheme since 2003, and more recently the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA) through its CarbonLimited project.The system has been the subject of a UK government funded feasibility study in 2008, an All Party Parliamentary Group report in 2011, and a European Commission debate in 2018.
- Personal Carbon Allowances (PCAs) - described in the book "How we can save the planet" by Mayer Hillman and Tina Fawcett. Work on PCAs is ongoing at the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford, UK. The title "PCAs" or "PCA scheme" is sometimes used generically to refer to any proposed form of personal carbon trading.
- Tradable Personal Pollution Allowances - originally proposed in an article by Dr. Kirk Barrett in 1995 and applicable to any form of pollution, including carbon dioxide.
- End-user Emissions Trading - preliminary proposal in an article by Suryapratim Roy and Edwin Woerdman which analyses some of the legal and policy nuances of a carbon emissions trading scheme for individuals, for instance on an EU-wide scale.
Individuals would most likely hold their emissions credits in electronic accounts, and would surrender them when they make carbon-related purchases, such as electricity, heating fuel and petroleum. PCAs could also require individuals to use credits for public transport. Tradable Energy Quotas would bring all other sectors of society (e.g. industry, government) within the scope of a single scheme.
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| Carbon budget |
Individuals who exceed their allocation (i.e. those who want to use more emissions credits than they have been given) would be able to purchase additional credits from those who use less, so individuals that are under allocation would profit from their small carbon footprint. There are two types of carbon credits, Certified Emission Reduction credits EUAs and CERs and Verified Carbon Credits.
Proponents of personal carbon trading claim that it is an equitable way of addressing climate change and peak oil, as it could guarantee that a national economy lives within its agreed carbon budget and ensure fair access to fuel and energy. They also believe it would increase ‘carbon literacy’ among the public, while encouraging more localised economies. For example, in the UK, the city of Manchester claims it is "the first city to undertake to empower all its citizens with carbon literacy."
Personal carbon trading has been criticised for its possible complexity and high implementation costs. As yet, there is minimal reliable data on these issues. There is also the fear that personal "rationing" and trading of allowances will be politically unacceptable, especially if those allowances are used to buy from industries who are already passing on costs from their participation in carbon levy or trading schemes such as the EU ETS.
Research in this area has shown that personal carbon trading would be a progressive policy instrument - redistributing money from the rich to the poor - as the rich use more energy than the poor, and so would need to buy allowances from them. This is in contrast to a direct carbon tax, under which all lower income people are worse off, prior to revenue redistribution.
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| Survey results from 2022 - 2023 show that Southern Europeans are more favourable to carbon rationing than people in Northern Europe |
Research and development
In 2021, a study published in Nature Sustainability concluded that personal carbon allowances (PCAs) could be a component of climate change mitigation. They find that the economic recovery from COVID-19 and novel digital technology capacities open a window of opportunity for first trial implementations in climate-conscious technologically advanced countries. PCAs would consist of - e.g. monetary - credit-feedbacks and decreasing default levels - aligned with calculated regional maximum emissions for emission-target achievement - of per capita emissions allowances. The researchers find that recent advances in machine learning technology and "smarter home and transport options make it possible to easily track and manage a large share of individuals' emissions" and that feedback effective in engaging individuals to reduce their energy-related emissions and relevant new personalized apps could be designed. Issues may include privacy, the evaluation of emissions from individuals that e.g. co-run multinational companies, the evaluation of offsets by inducing reductions of emissions by others or overall, accuracy of and requirements for the design of mechanisms to assess environmental impacts of product-, service-, labor- and lifestyle-decisions, requirements for the design and maintenance of anonymized accurate data, international enforcement, scope and loopholes of evaluations, adoption by major emitters in a landscape of globalized economic competition, public acceptance and the availability and prices of products and services.
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| The Climate Change Act 2008 |
Progress towards implementation
Norfolk Island is trialling the world's first personal carbon trading programme, starting in 2011.
The Climate Change Act 2008 also grants powers allowing the UK Government to introduce a personal carbon trading scheme without further primary legislation.
In May 2008 DEFRA completed a feasibility study into TEQs, with the headline finding that "personal carbon trading has potential to engage individuals in taking action to combat climate change, but is essentially ahead of its time and expected costs for implementation are high". Based on this DEFRA announced that "the (UK) Government remains interested in the concept of personal carbon trading and, although it will not be continuing its research programme at this stage, it will monitor the wealth of research focusing on this area and may introduce personal carbon trading if the value of carbon savings and cost implications change".
Later that same month the UK Parliament's Environmental Audit Committee produced their report on the subject, which concluded that ”personal carbon trading could be essential in helping to reduce our national carbon footprint" and rebuked the Government for delaying a full feasibility study, stating that "although we commend the Government for its intention to maintain engagement in academic work on the topic, we urge it to undertake a stronger role, leading and shaping debate and coordinating research".
Analysts have noted that to implement any effective carbon rationing system, "the government must convince the public that rationing levels are fair, that the system is administered transparently and fairly, and that evaders are few in number, likely to be detected and liable to stiff penalties if found guilty."
A 2010 paper into attitudes towards personal carbon trading suggests a general ambivalence, however the researchers noted that "In fact, moderate support was the commonest view". A four-week consumer trial on Personal Carbon Allowances carried out in London in June 2011 reported that "Participants engaged with the personal carbon allowance concept with enthusiasm".
In January 2011, the UK's All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil published a report into TEQs, garnering significant media coverage. This report highlights the significant research from a number of research centres produced since the Government's feasibility study, and argues that these studies demonstrate the benefits of to be far greater than was acknowledged in the Government's research. Accordingly, it urged them to move quickly to fund moves towards potential implementation in the near future. A 2018 European Commission debate on TEQs also concluded positively, but failed to create significant momentum towards implementation.
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