Many mitigation actions depend on collective lifestyles and attitudes, and on local everyday habits. In this area, we can find a large scope for mitigation.

The point is that these kinds of actions look difficult to access to for the following reasons.

a) They do not depend generally on sophisticated or massive technologies, while engineers as well as policy makers are used to thinking in terms of big infrastructures or of high-tech machines.

b) Although the relative weight of lifestyles on GHG emissions is clearly understood, it is tougher to act on them because the sources are diffuse. For instance, to reduce energy wasting in buildings’ heating or cooling, one will have to tackle thousands of different buildings.

c) These diffuse mitigation actions mobilize a know-how related to a multitude of local environmental services. However, their results show up slowly, their effectiveness spreads over the medium or long term, at a small scale. Therefore, they look less glamorous and their interest is less obvious to perceive.

Till now, less attention has been paid to the role of services on climate change mitigation. There is a know-how related to environmental services and it has to be recognized as such.

Services are not transferable under the same conditions as technologies. Environmental services concern mainly public goods. The private sector cannot provide them like it provides technologies or machines. Hence it is important to facilitate their development through public-private partnerships. A solid institutional framework with protection of the partners, clear rules of governance and long-term stability are necessary.

Some examples in urban areas concern services of customized public transportation, bicycle sharing, car sharing, management of the energy of buildings, and so on. Many of these services may require investments, like the insulation of the buildings, the improvement of the boilers, and the development of the car sharing networks. If the investments are carried out by the private sector, long-term contracts will be necessary to pay back for them.

There are three specific examples of co-benefits of the environmental services.

i) Since the biogas in landfills contains a lot of methane, it can be captured and recycled to produce electricity or it can be used as an alternative fuel for tracks. This action can lead to better waste management. One of the important co-benefits will be the protection of the aquifers.

ii) The grease waste from restaurants can be easily captured, collected and transformed into alternative fuel. This process will prevent from pouring it away into the environment where it may be decomposed to methane or CO2.

iii) A significant reduction (in some cases up to 20%) of fuel consumption for the big fleets of professional vehicles can be achieved by training the drivers and committing them to environmental-friendly driving.

Another major co-benefit will be to create new local employment opportunities that are not threatened by workforce relocations. There must exist thousands of cases like these ones and all the solutions, even the more modest ones, will have to be experimented.

Hopefully, the ultimate co-benefit of the mitigation can be to create new confidence in the relations between developed, emerging and developing countries. Working together to develop mitigation must become the foundation for a new human development deal beyond national egoisms.