Risk, Community Resilience and Sustainable Lifestyles

Ricardo Garcia Mira (University of A Coruña)
Adina Claudia Dumitru (University of A Coruña)

A new report from the UN-IPCC claims for urgent actions for mitigating the negative impact of climate change, to take under control the global warming, by stopping the increasing of the Earth temperature in 1,5 Celsius degrees. A number of research projects, carried out under the auspicious of the European Framesork Programme of the EU, have identified communities as relevant for addressing strategies and activities, and for activating social changes towards more sustainable lifestyles. Within this framework, the GLAMURS project carried out a research strategy to explore the economic, environmental and social factors influencing sustainable lifestyle change. The results provided by the GLAMURS project (Garcia-Mira & Dumitru, 2014, Coordinators) point out the relevance of promoting more Community activities , which ideally would allow the involvement in more sustainable behaviours. The interaction with communities provides a reference empowering its members for becoming more resilient in dealing with a number of different problems. The importance of organizing an interface among communities, scientists and policy-makers in order to improve citizens copying with eventual risk was suggested in previous works (Garcia-Mira and Lema, 2005), showing that communities are basic sources for copying with future risk and threats. This paper combines insights from psychology on dimensions explaining the engagement of citizens in sustainable initiatives, obstacles, and variables that influence human behaviour at this level. An understanding about what is happening is necessary for integrating our knowledge on human behaviour in the social context accompanying the transitions towards sustainability. Through multi-method empirical research, including quantitative and qualitative methodologies, we explored the complex array of factors influencing (un)sustainable lifestyle choices, and also zoomed in on members of sustainability initiatives as early adopters of sustainable lifestyles, to understand what motivates their engagement and how it impacts both their wellbeing and environmental footprint.