Abstract
The time-use (or activity) patterns individuals perform on a typical day – their individual lifestyles – fundamentally shape our society and the environment we live in. Not only are lifestyles evolving over time, driven by societal and technological change, they also significantly contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 12 “responsible consumption and production”, namely through the resource use and emissions associated with goods and services consumed to perform activities. We created an interactive, browser-based tool to visualize and intuitively explore statistical time-use data. The visualization helps to gain an overview about the available data, identify and compare common time-use patterns and draw up hypotheses about the relationship between changes in lifestyles and their social and environmental consequences. We use the tool to compare time-use data from different regions, time periods as well as socio-economic and demographic backgrounds and estimate the associated energy consumption. From a time-use perspective, any technological change which triggers changes in time allocation can only be environmentally sustainable if the environmental impact of the total of the activities performed after the change is lower than before.
Bieser, Jan C T