What if everyone did something to slow climate change?
It is naive to think that if you educate people, change would follow. The truth is, habits are hard to change. It is better to motivate people into making the change
MAKE more beef-free meals. Compost food scraps. Replace a natural gas stove with an electric one.
These are all fairly simple ways people can help combat climate change in their own kitchens. Still, most Americans don’t do it. Why?
Because it means changing life-long habits. Because they believe it won’t make a difference. Because they think their friends and neighbours aren’t doing it.
Research shows that it is not easy to motivate people to curb their emissions, but some strategies do work, and experts are trying to identify the best ones.
Magnus Bergquist, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said widespread behaviour transformation is difficult, as people often have contradictory goals. For example, changing habits or buying energy-efficient products “can conflict with people’s goals of seeking comfort, saving money and gaining social acceptance”, he said in a video interview.
Even those with the best intentions can run up against such conflicts. Leah Murphy, 63, of New Paltz in New York state, said she recycles, has reduced her use of plastic, shops with canvas bags and has installed energy-efficient light bulbs, among other efforts.
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Nonetheless, “over 30 years ago, when my first child was born, I arranged for a diaper service because it was supposed to be better for the environment”, she said in an interview. Yet there were still a lot of nappies to wash, and after six weeks, she switched to disposables.
“I told myself that the energy used to wash cloth diapers was probably just as bad for the environment as disposables,” she said. “That experience represents the start of a long series of rationalisations between convenience and conscience – more often than not, with convenience prevailing.”
At the same time, there is concern that promoting personal solutions to global climate change lets corporations and governments off the hook – and even plays into their hands. For example, a carbon footprint calculator was created by oil-and-gas company BP in 2004, as part of an advertising campaign to help people measure their impact on the environment. Critics said it was simply a way to shift the responsibility from big companies to everyday consumers.
But it’s wrong to look at solutions to the vast issue of climate change as solely good or bad, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Programme on Climate Change Communication, which researches the public’s knowledge, attitudes, behaviour and policy preferences on climate change.
BP did create the calculator “as a way to put the onus on individual consumers, but it’s still valuable as a basic concept to say, ‘well, if you really do want to reduce your own emissions, shouldn’t you probably start with an estimate of how much you’re emitting?’” he said in a video interview. “Both can be true.”
According to the organisation Project Drawdown, which advances climate solutions, individual and household actions taken together – from reducing food waste to installing LED lighting – have the potential to produce 25 to 30 per cent of the reductions in greenhouse emissions needed to avoid the extremely dangerous aspects of climate change.
Take eating beef. Cows, and to a lesser extent goats and sheep, are significant contributors to greenhouse gases through the methane they emit from gas and manure. And cows’ pastures are typically created by cutting down forests, which releases the carbon dioxide stored in trees.
But according to the World Resource Institute, a research organisation, if each person living in high beef-consuming countries – like the United States – ate 1.5 fewer burgers a week, the need for agricultural expansion and deforestation would be eliminated, and greenhouse gases, significantly reduced.
Still, modifying even such seemingly minor behaviour is difficult. Since the 1970s, overall beef consumption in the US has dropped considerably, because of the climate, as well as health and animal-welfare concerns. But it needs to decrease substantially more to address climate change. Instead, it slightly increased in 2022 to the highest in more than a decade.
It’s not clear why, but it’s an example of how hard it is to induce change.
“Some people have the naive idea that if we just educate people, change will follow,” Prof Bergquist said. “But it doesn’t take much to understand that we know we should exercise more; we know that we should eat more healthy; but we don’t do it. So, knowledge is a necessary, but insufficient factor. On top of that, we need motivation.”
He co-authored an analysis of data from 430 primary studies of strategies to improve environmental-related behaviour, such as recycling or biking or walking instead of driving.
Of six interventions to change people’s behaviours, the study found, providing data or information was the least successful, and that financial incentives like rebates, coupons and fines can make a difference.
But research has also found that social comparisons – what are my friends and neighbours doing? – had the biggest effect: When customers were told how their utility use compared to their neighbours’, the higher users often decreased their consumption by 1 to 2 per cent. And with solar panels, people are persuaded to install them if they see them on their neighbours’ rooftops.
A 2019 report by Rare, a 50-year-old global nonprofit that uses behavioural insights to encourage action to protect the environment, examined seven personal choices and their impact on climate change: switching to an electric vehicle, reducing air travel, eating a plant-rich diet, offsetting carbon, reducing food waste, tending carbon-sequestering soil and purchasing green energy.
The report found that if one in 10 people in each category adopted a reduction behaviour, total US global greenhouse emissions would decrease by 8 per cent. That would shrink by 80 per cent the projected gap between what the US has promised in the Paris Agreement – the international treaty on climate that took effect in 2016 – and where it is now, the report stated. NYTIMES
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