Living Well and "Lagom": How sufficiency measures can reduce climate impact and improve public well-being

Project name: Living Well and "Lagom": How sufficiency measures can reduce climate impact and improve public well-being
Project leader: Hampus André, Division of Sustainability Assessment and Management, SEED
Project group KTH: Elisabeth Ekener och Anna Björklund
Project period: 2025-2028
Funder: The Kamprad Family Foundation for Entrepreneurship, Research & Charity

To meet environmental targets, we need not only technological solutions but also sufficiency-oriented shifts in consumption, living well with less. This project examines how sufficiency measures can reduce environmental impact without diminishing well-being. It focuses on food, transport, and clothing consumption domains with large environmental footprints and salient social dimensions.

The aim is to equip civil society organizations, public authorities, policymakers, and the wider public with evidence and tools to implement and scale sufficiency measures. The expected outcome is to identify, in a scientifically robust way, sufficiency measures with substantial environmental benefits and minimal negative or even positive effects on well-being.

To achieve this, the project develops a novel life cycle assessment (LCA) method, Sufficiency-LCA. While LCA is a well-established and widely used approach for evaluating environmental impacts, it currently cannot assess sufficiency in a meaningful way. A central part of the project is also to develop tools for measuring how well-being may be affected by sufficiency measures. By providing new decision support that enables societal actors to appraise and implement sufficiency, the project fills critical knowledge gaps needed to reach environmental goals without compromising people’s well-being.

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