Consume consciously
Household consumption accounts for more than 60 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 50–80 per cent of total land, material and water use.
ONLINE: SUSLA – Your guide to a sustainable lifestyle
Susla is a detailed footprint calculator that provides both carbon and material footprints across five domains: housing, mobility, leisure, food and goods.
People want to contribute to a sustainable change. They want to be part of mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss. Despite easy access to information, it might still be challenging to know where to start and what actions really matter. We want to make these lifestyle changes easier.
Online event
SUSLA Finland is a community for all SUSLA users and everyone interested in lowering their carbon and material footprints. During the Race for the Future exhibition, the community presents a theme month including information on SUSLA, and tips and advice inspired by the exhibition topics and student life in the Helsinki city area. You can also participate in the community by sharing your own experiences of shifting to a new, sustainable lifestyle and get support from our team and other SUSLA members.
You can take part in the event at any time by joining our online community on Facebook. Link to the group will be published on this page on September 2nd.
SUSLA is yet a novel web application and it will be developed and improved in many ways already during this autumn. At the end of the theme month, participants will be sent a questionnaire, which aims at gathering your experiences of using SUSLA. Additionally, 10-20 participants have an opportunity to join an interview conducted by a researcher from ORSI research project (www.ecowelfare.fi). The purpose of this interview study is to produce scientific knowledge about the design and impacts of carbon footprint calculators.
Susla is a detailed footprint calculator that provides both carbon and material footprints across five domains: housing, mobility, leisure, food and goods.
After the personal footprint is calculated, the user can compare it to average footprints. The main objective of Susla is not just to calculate the footprint, but to work as a long-term companion that gives a variety of actionable options, collects them for a personal plan until 2030, and keeps track of the user’s lifestyle changes. Based on their choices, the users receive a list of actions that can be used for experimenting and following up the reduction of their personal footprints.
In Finland, where lifestyle carbon footprints are high, the potential to reduce them is remarkable. By changing consumption habits and making sustainable choices, individuals affect not only their own lives but also the surrounding societal structures Thus, by their own action, individuals can contribute to societal change significantly. (IGES et al. 2019)
Susla’s design is based on the 1.5-degree Lifestyles study (IGES et al., 2019), the 1.5 °C Puzzle game (Nielsen, 2020) and the Sustainable Lifestyles Accelerator (SLA), which is an international research project that seeks to promote sustainable lifestyles in seven countries.
The team:
Michael Lettenmeier, Sanna-Liisa Sihto-Nissilä, Salla Lahtinen and Sonja Nielsen from Aalto University, and Jari Kolehmainen from D-mat ltd.
Contacts: Salla Lahtinen: [email protected]
1.5 Degree Lifestyles
1.5 Degree Lifestyles is a case study about opportunities and suggested pathways for household level carbon footprint reductions to slow global warming to 1.5 degrees, as targeted by the Paris Agreement of the United Nations.
Designs for a Cooler Planet — Helsinki Design Week 2020
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