We recently conducted our first low carbon future participatory workshop with a group of 39 individuals. The workshop centred around a thorough reading into the current climate crisis, both locally and globally. It also establishes an understanding of impact of individual carbon footprint. This workshop used a pre designed questionnaire to analyse participants current individual footprint. A puzzle game was also conducted to achieve a certain pre-set target of carbon mitigation potential. This focused on adoption of various low carbon lifestyle options in the domains of housing, food, leisure, goods and mobility.

Stage 2 focusses on an intensive two week household experiment. Participants will select low carbon lifestyle options that they can adopt in their daily lives. The aim is to understand the mitigation potential through adoption of these simple low carbon lifestyles in ones daily life. The experiment will focus on detailed day-day documentation of participants experiences, and challenges.

This research project is a part of the UN Sustainable Lifestyle and Education Programme. Swechha in collaboration with the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), Japan, and implementing organisations Akatu Institute, Brazil; Chulalongkorn University, Thailand; ICLEI, South Africa; has been conducting a year long low carbon lifestyles project in India.

The aim is to collate country specific comprehensive list of behaviour changes for a low carbon lifestyles options. This project undertakes this through participatory research through citizen workshops, surveys and household experiments. It also collects data to estimate the average carbon footprint of individuals.