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Social Platform identifying Research and Policy ne.. (SPREAD)
Social Platform identifying Research and Policy needs for Sustainable Lifestyles
(SPREAD)
Start date: Jan 1, 2011,
End date: Dec 31, 2012
PROJECT
FINISHED
The concept of sustainable lifestyles refers to patterns of behaviour shaped by personal and social interactions and conditioned by environmental and socio-economic contexts that aim at improving well-being and health of present and future generations. Sustainable lifestyles embrace economic, social, technical, cultural, legal and environmental aspects at individual, local, national, EU and international levels. Sustainable lifestyles are then related to social innovation, given the crucial importance of bottom up inputs and creativity to change behaviours. Sustainable lifestyles are a relatively new idea in the sustainable consumption and production domain and comprehensive research agenda and policy strategy for promoting it is missing in the EU. The SPREAD project aims to fill this gap by consolidating existing body of knowledge from research projects and experiences of stakeholder networks, comprising researchers, health and education experts, industry, services and civil society representatives. It aims to create scenarios of sustainable lifestyles in 2050 through a social platform, focusing on sustainable living, moving, consuming and healthy life and by setting up a peoples’ forum and an online platform in order to host an ongoing dialogue open to public. By using the back-casting approach a roadmap with a timeline on how to achieve sustainable lifestyles will be developed. To support European policy makers in their work on sustainable lifestyles the project will develop a research agenda for the future. The 24-month project is coordinated by the UNEP/Wuppertal Institute Collaborating Centre for Sustainable Consumption and Production (CSCP, Germany). The project partners are the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN), the Northern Alliance for Sustainability (ANPED, Belgium), the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC), EuroHealthNet (Belgium), the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University (ULUND, Sweden), Demos Helsinki (Finland), Ecoinstitut Barcelona (ECOI, Spain), Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Ashoka France (ASHOKA, France).