today's facts & tomorrow's trends - SPREAD Sustainable Lifestyles ...

Challenges and
opportunities
for sustainable
lifestyles
The SPREAD project has chosen four lifestyle areas for deeper investigation:
• consuming (food, household and leisure consumer products)
• living (the built environment and homes)
• moving (individual mobility and transport)
• health and society (individual and society-wide health and equity)
This section outlines key challenges within each lifestyle area and explores
what is holding back change. In addition, each section seeks to uncover encouraging
trends and opportunities for more sustainable living options and promising
practices that demonstrate existing examples of progress toward sustainable
living.
These four lifestyle areas correspond with known current and future natural
resource and environmental “hot spots” related to individual consumption (see
box for some example statistics), and the need to improve health and well-being
in an ageing European society.
Unsustainable lifestyle trends - impact hot spots
Consuming: Consumption of meat and dairy is increasing not only in Europe,
but globally: between 1965 and 2005 global food consumption and production
increased 2.5 times (EEA 2005). There is, however, an increasing replacement
of beef and lamb by pork and, particularly, poultry across the EU (EEA 2010b)
and the total consumption of meat in 2008 fell by 2.2% compared to 2007 as a
result of rising food prices (EC 2009).The supply of goods from exotic locations
is on the rise (Schor 2005), the overall distance food travels is increasing (Hill
2008) and the consumption of processed food and meat is growing (EEA 2005).
Meat imports to the EU‐15 increased by 120% between 1990 and 2007. Cereal
imports increased by 83%, frozen vegetables by 174%, and bananas by 92%
over the same period (EEA 2010b). The global rate of consumption of bottled
water rose by 2.7% in 2009 (IBWA 2010).
Challenges and opportunities for sustainable lifestyles 39