The Big Picture
We are now living in the Anthropocene. Human activities are the dominant drivers of change on Earth. The goal of this project is to see through the noise, complexity, and scale of humanity to gain a physically-based understanding of what’s going on in the world, by quantifying human actions.
Time Matters
Time provides a universal and conserved measurement. Everyone has 24 hours in a day and spends each moment of it doing something, adding up to approximately 190 billion hours daily. The activities we engage in determine the emergent outcomes for our planet and society. Climate change, biodiversity loss, rapid technological change, infrastructure development, and global transportation networks are all examples of outcomes arising from our collective actions across the planet. But despite their importance, there has been no comprehensive description of human activities globally.
The Chronome
The ‘chronome’ quantifies how populations spend their time on average. It describes how societies partition their time between activities, seeking to create a high-level, quantitative overview with an emphasis on activities that tangibly alter the physical Earth, and ourselves. The framework is applicable to any point in time, enabling comparisons of 21st century civilization to other periods in human history. Assembling the Chronome is a highly interdisciplinary endeavour and draws on various aspects of natural and social sciences. Data are drawn from heterogenous public, private and academic sources, and include time use surveys, labour force statistics, input-output tables, small-scale observational studies, and new technologies.
New Dimensions
There is no universal way to describe human activities, and prior data collection efforts have been tailored towards particular objectives. As a result, existing time-use data describe human activities using some combination of dimensions, which could include physical outcomes, technology use, social context, or contact with nature. The Chronome project tackles this challenge by linking activities to generalized lexicons that focus on single dimensions of activity. This allows for transparent and unambiguous simplification of the otherwise incredibly complex phenomenon of human behaviour. Identifying and classifying based on single dimensions at a time allows for activities to be linked to external variables such as material end uses, screen time, and wellbeing.
Data and Publications
The Human Chronome Project is a new initiative based at McGill University in Montreal.
Contact eric.galbraith@mcgill.ca for details.