Self-reported sustainability, the ecological footprint and subjective well-being

In this paper we address two main research questions using survey data. First, we investigate whether respondents are able to self-assess the sustainability of their life styles. Second we explore the link between living a sustainable life and the level of subjective well-being reported by the respondents. The data we use in our analyses come from a survey we conducted in Flanders, Belgium (n = 1196). The survey includes two variables on subjective well-being (happiness and life satisfaction), a series of socio-economic variables and personality traits of the respondents, both a subjective and an objective assessment of the sustainability of the life style of the respondents and a number of environment-related variables (environmental concerns, knowledge of environmental problems and being a member of an environmental organization). To answer the first research question we compare the data for the subjective assessment of sustainability (SS - “To what extent would you describe your lifestyle as sustainable / environmentally friendly?” using a rating scale from 0 = not sustainable at all, to 10, totally sustainable) with the data for the objective assessment (OS – ecological footprint calculated according to the WWF methodology using 11 subquestions). In a preliminary analysis (subsample with n = 481) we found a correlation coefficient of -0,012 (p=0,01) indicating that respondents are not very able to self-assess the sustainability of their lifestyles. When the SS-values are corrected for personality traits, the correlation with the ecological footprint increases. A further analysis of who’s unable to self-assess the sustainability of his or her lifestyle surprisingly points to a negative impact of knowledge of environmental issues: respondents who claim to know more about environmental problems, report a significantly higher level of subjective sustainability, yet their ecological footprint is not significantly different from the others. As for the second research question, regression models using either life satisfaction or happiness as the dependent variable reveal that the ecological footprint does not impact on the reported scores, while the self-assessed sustainability values have a significant positive impact on subjective well-being (p