Have you wondered how individuals can have an impact on living sustainably within planetary boundaries? Challenges of global warming are a collective action problem, with billions of participants.
The Sustainable Consumption course focuses on the impact of individuals’ dietary choices on global carbon gas emissions, and the course’s conceptual structure can be applied to other domains including transportation choices and consumer choices broadly defined. Given our contemporary respect for free market solutions, this course analyzes the potential impact of consumer sovereignty to represent individuals’ interest in preserving a livable planetary environment. The course permits completion using an app with innovative data visualization as a tool to help learners measure, record, and validate the impact of individual and collective choice. The course covers various sustainability metrics such as carbon gas emissions, and material and water footprints. This course empowers learners as citizen-consumers to engage in sustainable collective action.
Learning goals:
- Interpret and analyse data related to greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, and sustainability
- Understand and explain the impact of individuals’ dietary choices on greenhouse gas emissions
- Explain the global environmental tragedy of the commons related to climate change
- Explain the difference between positive and negative externalities
- Distinguish between the challenge of “free riding” and the challenge of “negligibility” as related to the global problem of climate change
- Understand and provide examples of the concept of anti-rival goods
- Understand and apply the concept of distributed ledger accounting systems to measuring, recording, and validating positive consumption externalities and sustainable meal choices
- Explain how Elinor Ostrom’s polycentric governance could be used to help remedy the global tragedy of the atmospheric commons
Course level: Masters
Pre-requisities: This course is targeted to undergraduates and masters students, there is an option to use a smart phone app as an means to complete the course
Scope: 2 ECTS
Available languages: English and Finnish
Authors: University of Helsinki and Aalto University.
Where to study:
- University of Helsinki. Course codes: GPC001
- Open Access materials