Angela Druckman

Water issues have been gaining importance on the global political agenda in recent years. Nevertheless, water scarcity issues are inherently local. The impact of tourism activities on local water resources remains an understudied issue. Tourism is highly heterogeneous and offers a plethora of different products which cater for different tastes and budgets at different times of the year. Tourism products differ in terms of their economic impact but also in terms of their demand for water and other resources.Direct use of water by the tourism industry, which includes water used in hotels, golf courses, water parks and other tourism establishments, is relatively well understood. In addition to this volume of water, substantially more is required indirectly to produce food and other products which cater for tourism demand. Quantifying both the direct and indirect components is essential to understanding total water demand and productivity in the tourism sector. The common perception in ...

In order to meet the UK's challenging greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets, behaviour change will be necessary in addition to changes in technology. Traditionally, this has been approached from the angle of shifting the goods and services people purchase towards lower impact options. But an equally valid angle is through changing the way people use their time. In order to devise policies that take this approach, it is first necessary to understand the GHG implications of different types of time use, and, to this end, this paper describes a study in which we explored the GHG emissions per unit time for different types of activities. In this paper we focus on ‘non-work’ time, and examine how different activities, such as household chores and leisure pursuits, give rise to varying amounts of household carbon emissions. We do this first for an average person in a UK household. We then move on to look at how non-work time use varies within households, and how this impacts on result...

Understanding sustainable prosperity is an essential but complex task. It implies an ongoing multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research agenda. This working paper sets out the dimensions of this task. In doing so it also establishes the foundations for the research of the ESRC-funded Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). Our guiding vision for sustainable prosperity is one in which people everywhere have the capability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological and resource constraints of a finite planet. CUSP’s work will explore not just the economic aspects of this challenge, but also its social, political and philosophical dimensions. It will address the implications of sustainable prosperity at the level of households and firms; and it will explore sector-level and macro-economic implications of different pathways to prosperity. It will pay particular attention to the pragmatic steps that need to be taken by enterprise, government and civi...

Peak residential electricity demand takes place when people conduct simultaneous activities at specific times of the day. Social practices generate patterns of demand and can help understand why, where, with whom and when energy services are used at peak time. The aim of this work is to make use of recent UK time use and locational data to better understand: (i) how a set of component indices on synchronisation, variation, sharing and mobility indicate flexibility to shift demand; and (ii) the links between people's activities and peaks in greenhouse gases' intensities. The analysis is based on a recent UK time use dataset, providing 1-min interval data from GPS devices and 10-min data from diaries and questionnaires for 175 data days comprising 153 respondents. Findings show how greenhouse gases' intensities and flexibility to shift activities vary throughout the day. Morning peaks are characterised by high levels of synchronisation, shared activities and occupancy, wit...

What does it mean to live well in a low-carbon society? Clearly, the challenges of climate change and resource depletion are not just technological. Behaviours and lifestyles will also need to change. Consumption levels in richer nations look unsustainable when viewed from the perspective of global equity within carbon limits. A world in which a projected nine billion people all aspire to the levels of material comfort expected in the affluent West looks almost impossible to achieve. And yet it is also unrealistic to suppose that people will voluntarily forego the capabilities at least to live a decent life. Sustainable lives must still be worth living.

ABSTRACT Meeting UK ambitions for reducing waste will require careful planning and informed investment in infrastructure. An essential pre-requisite for both is the availability of robust waste data. This paper compares four methods for estimating food waste in Hampshire, two for businesses and two for households. Firstly, household food waste is estimated from food expenditure data using an expenditure data approach. This is compared against household waste collection data. Next, business waste is estimated by applying Defra published data from the Environment Agency Commercial and Industrial Waste Survey (2002) to the business profile of the hospitality sector in Hampshire. These results are compared with those from the application of a different survey approach to the same business profile. The research illustrates significant problems in achieving consistent and reliable data, especially for business. It was found that the Environment Agency 2002 survey published data are very likely to underestimate food waste in the Hospitality sector due to the amount of waste that the survey classifies in miscellaneous categories such as mixed or general waste. The findings could apply to other sectors. The paper discusses the implications of these findings, highlighting, in particular an urgent need for the release and publication of current C&I waste data, as well as more robust sector-specific surveys and consistent accounting frameworks.

The article introduces an integrated market-segmentation and tourism yield estimation framework for inbound tourism. Conventional approaches to yield estimation based on country of origin segmentation and total expenditure comparisons do not provide sufficient detail, especially for mature destinations dominated by large single-country source markets. By employing different segmentation approaches along with Tourism Satellite Accounts and various yield estimates, this article estimates direct economic contribution for subsegments of the UK market on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Overall expenditure across segments varies greatly, as do the spending ratios in different categories. In the case of Cyprus, the most potential for improving economic contribution currently lies in increasing spending on “food and beverages” and “culture and recreation.” Mass tourism therefore appears to offer the best return per monetary unit spent. Conducting similar studies in other destinations co...

This study presents a framework for attributing carbon emissions to the underlying demand for goods and services to meet people's functional needs. Using a two-region, input-output model, the study re-allocates all direct and indirect carbon emissions associated with UK ...

Sponsored by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of the Research Councils' Energy Programme, RESOLVE aims to unravel the complex links between lifestyles, values and the environment. In particular, the group will provide robust, ...

Sponsored by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of the Research Councils' Energy Programme, RESOLVE aims to unravel the complex links between lifestyles, values and the environment. In particular, the group will provide robust, ...

This paper reports on the progress of econometric modelling and scenario building work conducted as part of the Research Group on Lifestyles Values and Environment (RESOLVE) at the University of Surrey, UK. RESOLVE is an ESRC funded multi-disciplinary project group attempting to analyse the impact of lifestyle changes on future energy consumption of the UK by combining the economic, environmental, psychological and sociological approaches. The paper will describe how econometric modelling is being employed for forecasting future household energy demand and related carbon emissions until 2050. For this, not only the key economic drivers of income and price, but also the impact of non-economic factors, such as changes in lifestyle and values are being quantified. Subsequently, the framework will be used to model and understand UK final consumption, its impact on energy consumption (both direct and indirect) and on GHG emissions (both direct and indirect). The paper will also describe the development of lifestyle scenarios through to 2050, depicting energy consumption related to the household. The social, technological, economic, political, psychological and environmental factors that are likely to impact upon consumption will be explored through these scenarios. The econometric model will be used to inform the development of the scenarios in an iterative fashion, with key assumptions for each scenario being used to build illustrative forecasts. The end product of each scenario will include a narrative portraying lifestyles in 2050, along with a storyline of how this pathway might unfold from present circumstances according to key events, trends and shocks. Early efforts at developing a 'reference scenario' using the econometric model will be described, with preliminary results explored. The limitations of such a reference scenario in a rapidly changing policy environment will be discussed, in order to make clear the purpose of building a set of scenarios where explicit assumptions have been agreed upon in a systematic manner, for use in policyand decision-making. Please note this paper represents work in progress and must not be quoted without the explicit agreement of the authors.

Addressing the generation of household, municipal and industrial waste associated with modern living is a key challenge for sustainable development. For the most part however, waste accounts and data sets do not readily reveal how much waste is attributable to different aspects of modern living. In particular, most waste accounts are production based accounts which do not reveal which specific household activities are driving upstream waste production. In addition, many waste accounts omit the wastes incurred abroad as a result of the demand for imported goods. This paper sets out a framework to rectify these omissions and illustrates its application to the case of (upstream) paper and card wastes in the UK. Specifically, the study proposes an attribution framework based on environmental input output (EIO) analysis, in which production sector wastes are attributed to 18 high-level household functional use categories - such as food, housing, transport, education and so on - using a 1...