Living Well Within Planetary Limits: is it possible? And what can physicists contribute?

by Julia Steinberger (Université de Lausanne)

Thursday 13 Jul 2023, 15:00 → 17:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Magna

This seminar will report on several streams of research within
the "Living Well Within Limits" project. The Living Well Within Limits
project investigates the energy requirements of well-being, from
quantitative, participatory and provisioning systems perspectives. In this
presentation, I will communicate individual and cross-cutting findings
from the project, and their implications for the physics research
community. In particular, I will share our most recent results on the
international distribution of energy footprints, results on the national
characteristics that enable high well-being at low energy use, and
modelling of universal well-being energy requirements. I will show that
achieving low-carbon well-being, both from the beneficiary ("consumer")
and supply-chain (producer) sides, involves strong distributional and
political elements. Simply researching this area from a technical or
economic lens is insufficient to draw out the reasons for poor outcomes and
most promising avenues for positive change. I will connect this research to
potential contributions from the physics community to some of the most
important challenges humanity has ever faced.

Steinberger_LiLi_INFN.pdf