Why behaviour change is essential for addressing climate change
During WWII the public was exhorted to ‘dig for victory’ and women were called upon to ‘come into the factories’. More recently, we were told to ‘stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives’. Most of us complied with these instructions, although being forbidden to leave home would have been unthinkable just weeks before.
By contrast, the climate crisis is not presented by political leaders as something that people can, or should, be doing anything about in day-to-day life. Why not? For a start, people don’t like being told what to do by governments. True enough, but the war effort and coronavirus response demonstrate that when emergency strikes (and climate change really is now nothing short of an emergency), people can be mobilised to take action.
Why behaviour change is essential to fighting climate change
The reality is, convincing us all to act in more climate friendly ways will be indispensable to reaching ‘net zero’, the state in which we are no longer adding carbon emissions to the atmosphere.
The UK has cut its emissions by 40% since 1990 (Carmichael, 2019) largely through decarbonisation of the electricity supply. This process has required no public participation: Our homes’ electricity may now come from wind-generated energy instead of coal, but we haven’t needed to do anything to make that happen.
But that low-hanging fruit has now been picked, and future emissions reductions will not be achieved without substantial changes to our lifestyles. Approximately 40% of the emissions reductions needed to get to net zero will involve people travelling, eating, shopping and heating their homes differently. (Energy Research Partnership, 2021). The Climate Change Committee (CCC) (2021), is unequivocal that government must address the demand-side of emissions. In other words, they must encourage people to make choices in daily life that see them move away from high carbon services and products.
Therefore, the future of the planet is largely in our hands. Yet paradoxically many of us feel helpless in the face of the climate crisis. Arguably that’s due to a failure of leadership: Rarely have politicians have framed climate change as a challenge we can address collectively. It is accurate that the actions of one individual won’t make a dent in climate change. But nor could one person growing vegetables at home win the second world war. Lots of people dug for victory anyhow because they wanted to play their role in the collective war effort. The latter was presented as ‘we can do this together’, whereas the narrative of climate change is too often ‘it’s out of our hands’. As a result, people have so far made only limited changes in the direction of low-carbon living: “We are changing the climate; it’s not yet changing us” (Rowson and Corner, 2015, p. 6). That’s despite the fact that almost three quarters of us recognise that Britain is already feeling the ill effects of climate change, (Ipsos Mori, 2021).
This ongoing disconnect between how we live and climate change is a major but surmountable obstacle to stopping climate change. We need a new narrative for the climate crisis. A narrative that empowers people with a sense of agency and responsibility to make the changes that are needed.
So, what will it take for us to adopt pro-environmental behaviours? Behavioural science (also called behavioural economics) demonstrates that people can and do behave differently when given the right information and incentives. Experience proves that is certainly possible — albeit challenging — to change behaviour at mass scale: The UK previously had a very high teenage pregnancy rate; conception rates for women under 18 years have more than halved in the last decade. Drink driving and smoking both used to be the norm, but are now thankfully the exception to the rule.
Voluntary behaviour change could play an important role in combatting climate change alongside regulations to prohibit high-emissions behaviours. Regulations such as the forthcoming ban on selling vehicles that run on petrol or diesel will continue to be necessary, but outright bans that heavily limit personal choice are not the best policy approach for areas such as diet.
The behaviour changes needed to avert climate change
First, it’s necessary to determine what changes are necessary to avert a climate crisis. Consensus exists among scientists that many aspects of daily life will will need to look different in future: We’ll need to change how we travel (less flying and driving; more walking, cycling and public transport), the way we eat (wasting less food while consuming a more plant-based diet), how we heat our homes (choosing heat pumps instead of gas boilers) and what we buy (opting for lower-impact products and buying products made to last) (Climate Change Committee, 2021; Energy Research Partnership, 2021; Carmichael, 2019). The below chart from the Climate Change Committee shows the areas in which there is most unrealised potential to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Foremost is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a technological solution rather than behaviour change. However, the next three are all behavioural: less flying, diet change, and installing heat pumps in place of gas boilers at home:
These changes don’t have to be binary: we don’t need to stop flying completely. Rather, the 15% of frequent flyers who take 75% of flights annually in the UK (Department for Transport, 2014) need to fly less. Nor do must we all become vegan, but instead cut down on carbon-intensive food like beef, lamb and dairy while eating more plants.
Understanding what determines human behaviour is key
Despite the undeniable importance of behavioural changes, thus far the government has largely ignored the potential for changes in consumer choices to reduce emissions according to the Climate Change Committee (2021).
Rather than ignoring the potential benefits of behaviour shifts, policymakers could use the power of behavioural science to foster environmentally desirable changes. The central insight of behavioural science (also called behavioural economics) is that human behaviour is subject to numerous quirks of psychology. Examples include the phenomenon of ‘discounting the future’: We tend to value feeling good now above feeling good in the future — one reason why going for a run is often postponed in favour of watching Netflix, despite our best intentions. Another psychological quirk that exerts a strong influence on behaviour is the herd effect: People are greatly influenced by what people around them do. Even those of us who consider ourselves independent thinkers have a strong tendency to conform to perceived ‘normal’ behaviour. Such behavioural biases pose problems for climate action. Discounting he future means that enjoying a beef burger now can outweigh the future impact of our food choices on the environment (and our health). Plus, the power of social norms suggests that as long as our friends and peers are ignoring climate change, we probably will too.
So far, so depressing. However, behavioural economics reveals how people can be encouraged to act to address climate change. The below table, adapted from David Halpern’s 2015 book ‘Inside the Nudge Unit’, crystalises key insights of behavioural economics, using the acronym EAST: making behaviours easy, attractive, social and timely works to change behaviour.
Each of these four principles can be applied to environmentally desirable actions: The government could make it easier for people to act in climate-friendly ways, for example by collecting textile and food waste directly from all households. Equally, messages about simple, easy ways to eat differently could be communicated, such as by making bolognese sauce with half lentils and half beef instead of just meat — something which Sainsbury’s is already doing in its recent ad campaign. Environmentally desirable behaviours could be made more attractive to people through offering attractive low-carbon alternatives. Again, this is something that many businesses have been doing successfully: Leon’s plant-based LOVE burger (see below) and the new McPlant from McDonald’s show that eating less meat can be enjoyable.
Another way to make sustainable behaviours more attractive is to emphasise benefits people can enjoy in the short term, such as saving money by cycling to work, or becoming healthier through dietary change. Conversely, high emissions behaviours can be made less attractive. One widely-suggested policy intervention is to tax frequent flyers to create an incentive to fly less.
The human tendency to follow the crowd can be capitalised upon by implying that sustainability behaviours are already popular, or growing in popularity. For example, communicating that millions of others already cycle to work or took part in Veganuary last year.
Timely interventions could be made by targeting people who are experiencing a change, such as moving house or starting a new job. At such times, people are more open to trying a new way of commuting or installing a lower carbon heating system.
Government underplays the need for behaviour change
Remarkably, the UK government has yet to acknowledge the need for behaviour change. The Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution is the government’s strategy for accelerating the path to net zero. The plan is technocentric in its outlook, underpinned by an optimistic assumption that technology will deliver emissions reductions, with minimal need for behaviour or lifestyle change. The plan places a great deal of faith in as yet unproven technologies such as Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage. As far as aviation is concerned, the Plan relies upon innovation to deliver sustainable aviation fuels, although it is improbable that viable alternatives to fossil fuels will be available at scale any time soon. The Ten Point Plan does not cede that the growing demand for flying may need to be managed, despite most scientists believing this is essential as part of any realistic pathway to net zero (Gössling and Humpe, A., 2020). Nor does the Plan encompass dietary change or purchase behaviour. In fact, the only behaviour changes contemplated are the encouragement of green public transport, cycling and walking and instillation of limited numbers of heat pumps.
Why are politicians so reluctant to engage the public and encourage us to adopt planet-saving behaviours? Some behaviour changes rate low on the public acceptability scale. The headlines about politicians wanting to deprive you of your Sunday roast or put a stop to your summer holiday abroad almost write themselves. And there are of course complex questions about how farmers whose livelihoods currently depend on animal products could adapt to a more plant-based agricultural system. However, there is reason to believe that public support can be won, and impacted sectors of the economy successfully transitioned.
It would be wrong to suggest that the climate emergency can be addressed simply by encouraging people make behaviour changes. Important structural barriers impede climate-friendly behaviours: people won’t stop using their cars if reliable and affordable public transport isn’t available. A raft of policy interventions is needed to enable and sustain environmentally desirable behaviours, from improvements to public transport to addressing perverse subsidies of food production. Even so, our political leaders have already delayed too long in mobilising the public to act in more climate-friendly ways. Net zero is likely to remain an ever more elusive target unless the potential of behaviour change is harnessed.
References
Carmichael, R. (2019) Behaviour change, public engagement and Net Zero. A report for the Committee on Climate Change. Available at https://www.theccc.org.uk/publications/ and http://www.imperial.ac.uk/icept/publications/
Climate Change Committee (2021) Progress in reducing emissions 2021 Report to Parliament [online] Available at: https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/2021-progress-report-to-parliament/
Department for Transport. (2014). Public experiences of and attitudes towards air travel: 2014, (July), 1–15. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/336702/experiences-of-attitudes-towards-air-travel.pdf
Energy Research Partnership (2021) How Behaviour Change Will Unlock Net-Zero [online]. Available at: https://erpuk.org/project/how-behaviour-change-will-unlock-net-zero/
Gössling, S. and Humpe, A. (2020) The global scale, distribution and growth of aviation: Implications for climate change, Global Environmental Change, Volume 65, 102194, ISSN 0959–3780, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102194
Halpern, D. and Service, O. (2015) Inside the Nudge Unit: how small changes can make a big difference. London: Allen.
IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change (2021) The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [MassonDelmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.
Rowson, J. and Corner, A. (2015) The Seven Dimensions of Climate Change [online] Available at: https://www.thersa.org/reports/the-seven-dimensions-of-climate-change-introducing-a-new-way-to-think-talk-and-act
#climatechange #behaviouraleconomics #behaviouralscience #sustainability #environmentalpolicy
