Welcome to the Beacon for Sustainable Living!
We live in a social, climate and ecological emergency. The potential is vast to transform lifestyles globally to address climate and sustainability challenges while bringing about a fairer world.
The Beacon is shining a light on fresh, bold solutions for working with people and communities to shift behaviour at the scale and pace needed to reach one-earth living.
Together, we can take action with inspired creative strategies and overlooked solutions.
Communicate
Talk about this challenging topic with others. Learn about effective messaging and framing.
Solutions
Explore strategic shifts and promising action areas.
Taking action
Test creative strategies. Connect and share skills together.
Why sustainable living?
The need to transform our everyday lives is urgent, extensive and significant. It’s also a great opportunity to enable healthy, happy, and meaningful living for all, within the ecological means of our planet.
Globally, activities at the household level are associated with as much as 72% of our greenhouse gas emissions, 75% of our natural resource consumption and 50% of all waste.
We can only achieve the targets of the Paris Agreement on climate change and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals with a big transformation in how we live.
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The world's high consumers need to reduce their carbon emissions 80% by 2050.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, lifestyles and behaviour changes can result in a 40-70% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2050 with the right policies, infrastructure and technologies in place. At the same time, many of the world’s people need to be able to consume more to lead good-quality lives that meet basic needs.
Lifestyles and behaviour changes can result in up to a 70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
There is an urgent need for new economies that pivot from a focus on growth and excess consumption towards enabling healthy and fulfilling lives – in ways that regenerate nature, rather than destroying it. We have an opportunity to shift away from materialism and an obsession with “stuff” towards what truly matters: trust, belonging, purpose, health, wellbeing, community and meaning.
In the process, we can fundamentally change our relationship with all life on Earth.
To meet this challenge, we will need both systemic solutions and individual behaviour changes in our social practices to achieve rapid, deep and lasting shifts to sustainable ways of living.
The Beacon is led by OneEarth Living and Hot or Cool, with generous support from the KR Foundation