Social Equity and Lifestyle Conscious Policy Making for the Energy Transition

This research aims to develop a social equity conscious policy making framework, cognizant of lifestyle, consumption, demographics, proactiveness and the distribution of costs and benefits across society. The proposed framework is applicable in multiple jurisdictions, wherever consumption, environmental footprint intensity, and basic societal demographic data are available. For preference weighting, a survey is undertaken to identify stakeholder preferences toward environmental issues and proactive behavior to reduce environmental burdens. A framework is developed and applied to the case study nation of Japan, which is undergoing shifting demographics including both an aging, shrinking population. This novel study demonstrates the nature of societal outcomes through the lens of inequity underpinned by lifestyle related environmental burdens (objective factors) and stakeholder preferences (subjective factors). We identify that the mitigation of environmental footprints leads to improved social equity outcomes, and that stakeholder proactiveness can positively influence both equity and consumption burden outcomes. A key finding is that broad participation is shown to be more effective than targeted participation. Research findings can assist policy makers through an identification of consumption, demographic and footprint trends and their impacts on social inequity and consumption burden outcomes.