The PSLifestyle Project Kicks Off
72% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are the result of our daily life choices. From how we live, choose to travel or what we put on the table – every action we take has an impact on the environment. But this also means that there is a huge potential to drive positive change by motivating, engaging and supporting citizens to strive for a more sustainable lifestyle.
Evidence suggests that attempts to change citizens’ habits by simply informing them on the environmental threats that we face have not led to significant behaviour change. Realising what should be changed often does not lead to the actions needed to actually generate such change.
Our recently launched project “PSLifestyle – Co-creating a Positive and Sustainable Lifestyle Tool with and for European Citizens” addresses the challenge of closing the gap between climate awareness and individual action by increasing citizen participation in sustainability issues. A web-based application (APP) will be developed and used to collect, monitor and analyse citizens’ consumption data and to jointly research, develop and implement everyday solutions to mitigate climate change.
The PSLifestyle project will build a data-driven movement with and for the citizens to enable more sustainable lifestyles across Europe. The project’s goal is to engage a total of four million European citizens (with a particular focus on eight European countries) in data collection and sharing through the PSLifestyle APP.
The APP will be based on the consumption-driven carbon footprint calculator ‘Lifestyle Test’, set up by the project partner Sitra in 2017. In PSLifestyle, a substantially improved version of the APP will be further developed and contextualised to align with the citizens’ local realities. This will be done by creating a localised version of the application through living labs in order to understand local capabilities, opportunities, and motivations. The project will also work with other societal catalysts, such as policymakers, businesses, civil society organisations (CSOs), and the academia to design solutions based on citizens’ collected data.
As a consortium partner in Slovenia, one of the 8 pilot countries, Circular Change is working hand in hand with the Municipality of Ljubljana to collect and validate available input data, coordinate and implement citizen engagement activities through living labs in Slovenia, to test the pilot as well as deploy at large-scale the PSLifestyle APP across the country, ensuring that as many citizens use the application and provide relevant data. Moreover, we will and actively work in engagement activities with CSOs, policy makers, academia and business/industry actors and promote and disseminate the project activities and results in Slovenia.
The PSLifestyle project is funded under the European Union’s research program Horizon 2020 and it will be running over a period of 3,5 years (2021-2025). The project relies on the expertise of a consortium of 16 European partners.
