Understanding factors of successful engagement around energy consumption between and among households.

ABSTRACT An increasing number of researchers are using social engagement techniques such as neighborhood comparison and competition to encourage energy conservation, yet community reception and experience with such systems have not been well studied. We also find that researchers have not thoroughly investigated how different households use these systems and how their uses differ from one another. We explore these questions in a 4-10 month field deployment of a social-energy monitoring application across 15 households, in two distinct locations. We contribute results that describe conditions under which these techniques were effective and ineffective. Our results imply that understanding factors such as a building, or community's layout, context knowledge of community members, accountability and adherence to social norms, trust, and length of residence are key for future design of social-energy applications

Prospects for radical emissions reduction through behaviour and lifestyle change

Over the past two decades, scholars and practitioners across the social sciences, in policy and beyond have proposed, trialled and developed a wide range of theoretical and practical approaches designed to bring about changes in behaviours and lifestyles that contribute to climate change. With the exception of the establishment of a small number of iconic behaviours such as recycling, it has however proved extremely difficult to bring about meaningful transformations in personal greenhouse gas emissions at either the individual or societal level, with multiple reviews now pointing to the limited efficacy of current approaches. We argue that the majority of approaches designed to achieve mitigation have been constrained by the need to operate within prevailing social scientific, economic and political orthodoxies which have precluded the possibility of non-marginal change. In this paper we ask what a truly radical approach to reducing personal emissions would look like from social science perspectives which challenge the unstated assumptions severely limiting action to date, and which explore new alternatives for change. We emphasise the difficulties likely to impede the instituting of genuinely radical societal change regarding climate change mitigation, whilst proposing ways that the ground could be prepared for such a transformation to take place

Creating Low-carbon Communities: Evaluating the Role of Individual Agency and Systemic Inequality in San Jose, CA

Following a scholarly need to test compelling community level sociodemographic representations of environmental behaviors and outcomes, a sequential mixed method approach was used to evaluate the connections of human agency and systemic inequalities with carbon footprints. Statistical analyses of the 2016 SDG San Jose Dashboard data of city blocks and 2009 - 2013 ACS survey data were supplemented with interviews with eight climate action-oriented community engagement professionals in the South Bay. Boundary limiting socioeconomic conditions for systemic inequalities and human agency, dimensions of Gidden’s Structuration model, were specified. Partially supporting structural inequality theories, socioeconomic resources, primarily, and to a lesser extent dominant race concentration, were associated with larger carbon footprints, particularly when wealth was concentrated. Both human (time driven alone) and demographic (senior and mid-aged blocks) agencies were also in part at play in shrinking or even enlarging carbon footprints, in wealthier communities. These findings not only contributed to the literature on climate action, but also highlighted the need for targeted interventions in communities of different socioeconomic standing

Sustainable consumption: towards action and impact. : International scientific conference November 6th-8th 2011, Hamburg - European Green Capital 2011, Germany: abstract volume

This volume contains the abstracts of all oral and poster presentations of the international scientific conference „Sustainable Consumption – Towards Action and Impact“ held in Hamburg (Germany) on November 6th-8th 2011. This unique conference aims to promote a comprehensive academic discourse on issues concerning sustainable consumption and brings together scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines. In modern societies, private consumption is a multifaceted and ambivalent phenomenon: it is a ubiquitous social practice and an economic driving force, yet at the same time, its consequences are in conflict with important social and environmental sustainability goals. Finding paths towards “sustainable consumption” has therefore become a major political issue. In order to properly understand the challenge of “sustainable consumption”, identify unsustainable patterns of consumption and bring forward the necessary innovations, a collaborative effort of researchers from different disciplines is needed

Food System and Food Security Study for the City of Cape Town

Food insecurity is a critical, but poorly understood, challenge for the health and development of Capetonians. Food insecurity is often imagined as hunger, but it is far broader than that. Households are considered food secure when they have “physical and economic access to sufficient and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life” (WHO/FAO 1996). Health is not merely the absence of disease, but also encompasses good nutrition and healthy lifestyles. Individuals in a food insecure household and/or community are at greater risk due to diets of poor nutritional value, which lowers immunity against diseases. In children, food insecurity is known to stunt growth and development and this places the child in a disadvantaged position from early on in life. Any improvement in the nutritional profile of an individual is beneficial and as the family and community become more food secure, the greater the benefit. It further reduces the demand on health services. In the Cape Town context, food insecurity manifests not just as hunger, but as long term consumption of a limited variety of foods, reduction in meal sizes and choices to eat calorie dense, nutritionally poor foods in an effort to get enough food to get by. Associated with this food insecurity are chronic malnutrition and micronutrient deficiency, particularly among young children, and an increase in obesity, diabetes and other diet related illnesses. Food insecurity is therefore not about food not being available, it is about households not having the economic or physical resources to access enough of the right kind of food. The latest study of food insecurity in Cape Town found that 75 percent of households in sampled low-income areas were food insecure, with 58 percent falling into the severely food insecurity category. Food insecurity is caused by household scale characteristics, such as income poverty, but also by wider structural issues, such as the local food retail environment and the price and availability of healthy relative to less healthy foods. The City of Cape Town therefore commissioned a study based on the following understanding of the food security challenge facing the City. “Food security or the lack thereof is the outcome of complex and multi-dimensional factors comprising a food system. Therefore, food insecurity is the result of failures or inefficiencies in one or more dimensions of the food system. This necessitates a holistic analysis of the food system that than can provide insights into the various components of the system, especially in our context as a developing world city.” The call for a food system study sees the City of Cape Town taking the lead nationally, being the first metropolitan area to seek to engage in the food system in a holistic manner and attempting to understand what role the city needs to play in the food system. The City must work towards a food system that is reliable, sustainable and transparent. Such a system will generate household food security that is less dependent on welfarist responses to the challenge. In this context, reliability is taken to mean stable and consistent prices, the nutritional quality of available and accessible food, and food safety. Sustainability means that the food system does not degrade the environmental, economic and social environment. Finally, transparency refers to the legibility of the system and its control by the state and citizens

Evaluation of a Pervasive Game for Domestic Energy Engagement Among Teenagers

In this article, we present Power Agent—a pervasive game designed to encourage teenagers and their families to reduce energy consumption in the home. The ideas behind this mobile phonebased game are twofold; to transform the home environment and its devices into a learning arena for hands-on experience with electricity usage and to promote engagement via a team competition scheme. We report on the game’s evaluation with six teenagers and their families who played the game for ten days in two cities in Sweden. Data collection consisted of home energy measurements before, during, and after a game trial, in addition to interviews with participants at the end of the evaluation. The results suggest that the game concept was highly efficient in motivating and engaging the players and their families to change their daily energy-consumption patterns during the game trial. Although the evaluation does not permit any conclusions as to whether the game had any postgame effects on behavior, we can conclude that the pervasive persuasive game approach appears to be highly promising in regard to energy conservation and similar fields or issues

Scenarios for the development of smart grids in the UK: synthesis report

‘Smart grid’ is a catch-all term for the smart options that could transform the ways society produces, delivers and consumes energy, and potentially the way we conceive of these services. Delivering energy more intelligently will be fundamental to decarbonising the UK electricity system at least possible cost, while maintaining security and reliability of supply. Smarter energy delivery is expected to allow the integration of more low carbon technologies and to be much more cost effective than traditional methods, as well as contributing to economic growth by opening up new business and innovation opportunities. Innovating new options for energy system management could lead to cost savings of up to £10bn, even if low carbon technologies do not emerge. This saving will be much higher if UK renewable energy targets are achieved. Building on extensive expert feedback and input, this report describes four smart grid scenarios which consider how the UK’s electricity system might develop to 2050. The scenarios outline how political decisions, as well as those made in regulation, finance, technology, consumer and social behaviour, market design or response, might affect the decisions of other actors and limit or allow the availability of future options. The project aims to explore the degree of uncertainty around the current direction of the electricity system and the complex interactions of a whole host of factors that may lead to any one of a wide range of outcomes. Our addition to this discussion will help decision makers to understand the implications of possible actions and better plan for the future, whilst recognising that it may take any one of a number of forms

The Links Between the Neighborhood Food Environment and Childhood Nutrition

Identifies key studies on the availability of, and residents' access to, healthy foods and how they influence the choices of low-income children and their families. Discusses efforts to bring about improvements and new research and policy priorities