The SPREAD project develops four scenarios on future sustainable lifestyles in 2050

The CSCP-lead SPREAD Sustainable Lifestyles 2050 project has developed four  scenarios of future societies that overcome the current challenges of our unsustainable lifestyles. The aim of the scenarios is to help individuals and decision-makers to visualize the “unthinkable” and plan for more sustainable living options for the future: “Transparency gets the prices right”, “Wikidemocracy”, “Rediscovery of local resources” or the “‘We can’ generation works together” are some examples of scenario elements which have the potential to mainstream promising sustainable practices.

 

Singular Super Champions, Local Loops, Empathetic Communities, and Governing the Commons are the four scenarios that push current boundaries and explore different options of more sustainable living. They build on different combinations of two critical uncertainties, related to technology and social norms, which have been identified through the research and consultation work of the SPREAD project. The report also outlines  pathways from today to 2050 which explore what might have happened in order to reach each sustainable living scenario. The scenario stories and timelines describe what life is like for people in each scenario in the future and explore different options that would enable us to overcome current lifestyle impacts particularly in the areas of food, mobility, housing and health. Some examples are “Urban agriculture”, “Wise Personal Food Shopper”, “ID DNA-Cards”, “Bank of energy”, “3D-printing”, “the TV series The Altruist”, or “Reduced personal living space”.

 

As different as all of the scenarios are from each other, they share one basic assumption: To change living in a way that reduces the annual individual material footprint from an average of 27,000-40,000 kg today to 8,000 kg per person by 2050.

 

Our SPREAD scenarios provide a starting point for identifying opportunity spaces for the development of creative strategies to not only mainstream current sustainable practices but also to develop new solutions for more sustainable living societies. The next step in the SPREAD process will result in a roadmap of strategic actions for policy makers and other societal stakeholders to assist in planning for the future “unthinkable”.

 

Explore what sustainable lifestyles could look like in 2050.  We hope that these scenarios will inspire your own ideas on how to enable more sustainable living in the future.
Click here to download the Scenarios for Sustainable Lifestyles 2050.