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Abstract

The ambitious climate policy goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement cannot be achieved without an active involvement of cities and individual actors. This chapter pays special attention to individuals in two core roles: consumers and citizens. It reports the results of a 1-year urban real-world lab experiment in the German capital Berlin, with 100 private households reducing their personal carbon footprints by using various feedbacks, including a weekly carbon tracker. The project did address the consumer and the citizen alike. We propose to differentiate the citizen with respect to moral and political aspects, respectively. While a reduction of the average carbon footprint of about 11% (33% less than the German average) could be achieved, the chapter contextualises the project results by focusing on an improved interplay between consumer and citizen and by asking how the (local) political system could profit from real-world labs.