Green lifestyle improves wellbeing

Typically when we think about taking environmentally friendly actions, we think of it as a tradeoff with our quality of life, with there being a sentiment that we have to sacrifice some level of well-being to act green. However, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change, this might not need to be the case after all. Scientists refer to climate solutions that affect our daily lives, such as eating less meat as ‘demand-side’ climate solutions, which are in contrast to ‘supply-side’ solutions that attempt to shift the source of our electricity away from fossil fuels towards low-carbon energy sources but do not affect our everyday lives. Lead author Felix Creutzig from TU Berlin and his co-authors were the first to comprehensively investigate the potential of these lifestyle related demand-side climate solutions to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and the first to try to understand their potential impact on human wellbeing. They did this by comparing the impact of climate mitigating solutions with 18 distinct measures of human wellbeing. Verner Viisainen spoke with Felix to find out more about their findings.