Truly sustainable living : planetary boundaries concept applied at the neighbourhood level

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“If all the inhabitants of the planet were living the way the inhabitants of my neighbourhood do, would one planet be enough?” ***The aim of the present research program is to enable the citizen, the architect, the town planner and all the other stakeholders of a neighbourhood to identify the most efficient pathways in the transition toward “absolute sustainability” with a life cycle perspective. Sustainable development should, by definition, allow us to fulfill our needs without exceeding the planetary boundaries. The planetary boundaries concept is meant to understand what margin of the planet safe operating space remains available for humanity: it focuses on a global footprint of humanity, and assesses if global thresholds leading to serious and irreversible consequences have been exceeded. It is not meant to give any information on the lifestyle of individuals. Life cycle analysis (LCA) is a systemic decision-making tool that allows determining if an alternative is preferable to another accounting for potential burden shifting. LCA can be applied, among other possibilities, to individual lifestyles. LCA is a tool for relative sustainability: If LCA allows determining that lifestyle A is more sustainable than lifestyle B, it does not allow to say to what extent A is sustainable in absolute. Some efforts, to which I participated, have recently been done to combine life cycle analysis and planetary boundaries concepts and the present program builds on those recent and promising progresses.***This research program aims at promoting absolutely sustainable lifestyles and at guiding the transition toward sustainable neighbourhoods allowing such lifestyles. This implies the creation and the application of new diagnostic tools allowing to put in perspective the LCA based environmental footprint of the neighbourhood inhabitants with the planetary boundaries in order to guide the transition toward absolutely sustainable neighbourhoods defined as “Neighbourhoods that allows their citizens to have a lifestyle respecting their individual share of the planetary boundaries”.