The outcomes of the climate calculator describe the areas of your consumption and lifestyle where your emissions of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) are the highest, and hence where your efforts are likely to have the largest quantitative effect.
Among your areas of consumption and lifestyle, those where a change towards more environmental sustainability and social justice is the easiest are those for which (1) you take the decisions, (2) with no need to coordinate with others, nor to wait for political decisions to be taken. In general these areas of consumption and lifestyle are the following, in decreasing order of difficulty (easiest first):
- food;
- clothing;
- plane travels for holiday.
In each case, additional competencies are needed, to engage successfully in an alternative consumption or lifestyle model. You will find on this website a selection of online courses for you to acquire some of them, proposed by the CosmoPolitical Cooperative and by qualified external sources.
Other areas of consumption or lifestyle are more difficult to change, because they depend upon the availability of infrastructure, or of public policies. These areas of consumption are:
- local transport, including daily commuting (dependent upon the existing transport infrastructure and urban planning);
- durable goods other than clothing, e.g. appliances, consumer electronics (dependent upon the existing supply of durable goods and upon reliable information on their sustainability);
- consumable industrial goods, e.g. detergents, hygiene products (idem.);
- housing (dependent upon the sustainability of the available supply of housing, on heavy investment if you are the owner of your home, and on the location of the workplace of the members of your household);
- daily leisure (dependent upon the existing cultural and leisure infrastructure).