Communicating the environmental impacts of individual actions in the context of Planetary Boundaries

Abstract

Human activities, driven by high consumption and rapid development, are pushing environmental degradation beyond the planet's carrying capacities. Changing consumption patterns is a key lever to reduce these environmental pressures to sustainable levels, and this can be quantified using life-cycle assessment (LCA). However, there are misconceptions about the effectiveness of specific actions, and LCA results are typically not contextualized by comparison to environmental carrying capacities, making it difficult to distinguish between “better for the environment” and “good enough for the environment”. This study seeks to address this gap by communicating environmental impacts of lifestyle choices on an absolute scale, using relatable frameworks like that of the Planetary Boundaries. It estimates the footprint of an average person's lifestyle, as well as the impacts of 23 common daily activities, and compares these impacts to an individual's carrying capacity budget for 6 impact categories. Applied to Denmark, the results reveal a significant overshoot of personal environmental budgets across all categories, except for water use, with some activities alone surpassing the full personal budget for impact categories like climate change and resource use. For those major contributing activities, alternative ways of fulfilling them can help realign lifestyles with environmental budgets. Other activities – despite usually perceived as highly impactful – are actually found insignificant. Overall, bringing environmental impacts to sustainable levels through individual actions alone are insufficient to bring environmental impacts to sustainable levels, particularly with the current available technologies. This calls for the need for systemic changes that prioritize sustainable technologies and the adoption of sufficiency-focused lifestyles.