Design and analysis of carbon-neutral lifestyle change scenarios for future assessment of health and wellbeing: An urban system-oriented approach

Evidently, lifestyle changes could be an important element in the carbon-neutral and sustainable transformation of cities. The current research landscape provides numerous lifestyle change options for urban dwellers that aim to reduce demand-side greenhouse gas emissions. Our analysis of these options revealed that the bulk of these options were targeting urban mobility, buildings, households, and nutrition. However, we have found out that the studies on carbon-neutral lifestyle change options for cities (i) did not take the projected future changes in demographics and climate into account, and (ii) did not investigated the possible health outcomes. Furthermore, these lifestyle change options were presented as generic options that lacked the consideration for the feasibility and applicability to the various socio-demographic and socio-economic groups of urban population. In light of these findings, we  discuss that how a previously developed conceptual model of health-related urban wellbeing could be employed for designing detailed climate-neutral lifestyle change scenarios that include interactions and interrelations between different variables of the urban system as well as the diverse and heterogeneous socio-economic and socio-demographic profile of urban dwellers.

In this current work, we present the application of our suggested approach for scenario design through developing detailed climate-neutral lifestyle change scenarios targeting urban mobility for a district of Hamburg, Germany. They are planned to be used as model scenarios in a rich data-driven agent-based model coupled with a high-resolution urban climate model (PALM4-U) to investigate their effects on individual heat stress exposure. With this presentation, our ultimate aim is to show how carbon-neutral lifestyle change scenario design can benefit from the utilization of a holistic scenario design process where health-related dynamics and variables within the urban system are taken into account, and how this approach can carry the proposed carbon-neutral lifestyle change options beyond the current one-size-fits-all approach.