Decent living for all does not have to cost the Earth

Applying the decent living concept established by the IIASA Energy Program, the study estimated the energy resources needed for everyone to be provided decent living standards in 2050 – meaning all their basic human needs such as shelter, mobility, food, and hygiene are met, while also having access to modern, high quality healthcare, education, and information technology.

The findings, published in in the journal Global Environmental Change, reveal that decent living standards could be provided to the entire global population of 10 billion that is expected to be reached by 2050, for less than 40% of today’s global energy. This is roughly 25% of that forecast by the International Energy Agency if current trends continue. This level of global energy consumption is roughly the same as during the 1960s, when the population was only three billion.

The authors emphasize that achieving this would require sweeping changes in current consumption, widespread deployment of advanced technologies, and the elimination of mass global inequalities. However, not only do the findings show that the energy required to provide a decent living could likely be met entirely by clean sources, but it also offers a firm rebuttal to reactive claims that reducing global consumption to sustainable levels requires an end to modern comforts and a ‘return to the dark ages’.

The authors’ tongue in cheek response to the critique that sweeping energy reform would require us all to become ‘cave dwellers’ was: “Yes, perhaps, but these are rather luxurious caves with highly-efficient facilities for cooking, storing food, and washing clothes; comfortable temperatures maintained throughout the year, computer networks — among other things — not to mention the larger caves providing universal healthcare and education to all 5-19 year olds.”

The study calculated minimum final energy requirements, both direct and indirect, to provide decent living standards. Final energy is that delivered to the consumer's door, for example, heating, electricity or the petrol that goes into a car, rather than the energy embedded in fuels themselves – much of which is lost at power stations in the case of fossil fuels.

The team built a final energy-model, which builds upon a list of basic material needs that underpin human wellbeing previously developed by Narasimha Rao and Jihoon Min at IIASA.

The study compared current final energy consumption across 119 countries to the estimates of final energy needed for decent living and found the vast majority of countries are living in significant surplus. In countries that are today’s highest per-capita consumers, energy cuts of nearly 95% are possible while still providing decent living standards to all.

“Currently, only 17% of global final energy consumption is from non-fossil fuel sources, but that is nearly 50% of what we estimate is needed to provide a decent standard of living for all in 2050,” says study lead author Joel Millward-Hopkins from the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds. “Overall, our study is consistent with the long-standing arguments that the technological solutions already exist to support reducing energy consumption to a sustainable level. What we add is that the material sacrifices needed for these reductions are far smaller than many popular narratives imply.”

“While government officials are levelling charges that environmental activists ‘threaten our way of life’ it is worth re-examining what that way of life should entail. There has been a tendency to simplify the idea of a good life into the notion that more is better,” adds study coauthor Julia Steinberger, leader of the Living Well Within Limits project at the University of Leeds and professor at the Université de Lausanne in Switzerland. “It is clearly within our grasp to provide a decent life for everyone while still protecting our climate and ecosystems.”

“This study also confirms our earlier findings at a global scale that eradicating poverty is not an impediment to climate stabilization, rather it’s the pursuit of unmitigated affluence across the world,” says Rao, who is a senior IIASA researcher and a faculty member at the Yale School of the Environment.

Study coauthor Yannick Oswald, PhD researcher at the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds concludes: “To avoid ecological collapse, it is clear that drastic and challenging societal transformations must occur at all levels, from the individual to institutional, and from supply through to demand.”

Adapted from a press release by the University of Leeds.