Abstract for: Global food and energy scenarios driven by lifestyle changes

Lifestyle changes are critical for meeting climate goals, yet integrated assessment models (IAMs) typically represent behavioural dynamics through exogenous assumptions or reduced-form elasticities. Existing approaches rarely capture diffusion, heterogeneity, or feedback-driven lifestyle change across multiple consumption domains in a coherent, endogenous framework. This limits the ability to assess the full mitigation potential of behavioural change and the policy levers that could enable it. This paper integrates an endogenous lifestyle module into the FeliX model. Building on the LIFE lifestyle typology, lifestyle composition and change are modelled as dynamic processes driven by opportunity, identity, and experience effects. Such lifestyle changes are linked to sectoral energy and food demand using the avoid-shift-improve framework. Lifestyle dynamics generate distinct demand pathways across population groups even under the same macroeconomic conditions related to income and aging. They demonstrate that climate change mitigation is concentrated in enabled lifestyles, yet broad participation in climate action still matters. The results also show that economic and demographic impacts of climate change also affect lifestyle transitions. Endogenizing lifestyle dynamics within a fully coupled global model reveals nonlinearities and feedback effects that exogenous approaches obscure. Our model and findings advance methodological foundations for representing lifestyle change in global mitigation pathways. the authors used ChatGPT to improve linguistic readability.