As Naomi Klein asserts, for individual action to be effective in mitigating climate change, there must be significant cumulative action: one individual cannot make any significant change by his/herself. This is the main premise occurring throughout my blog.
But climate change is not a top priority for most people. This perturbs the effectiveness of individual action on mitigating climate change: if people don't care about the environment, they definitely won't alter lifestyle habits to reduce their impact on the Earth and we won't get the desired cumulative action.
Some have argued that education offers a way to solve this slack behaviour, using the linear ABC model:
This is called the value-action gap: people say they want to be green, but they don't act upon it, with their values rarely influencing actions. Encouraging behavioural change is generally hard and therefore, there is an unwillingness to produce effective awareness campaigns that attempt to generate attitude change - exactly what I found earlier!
So how do we address this? How do we produce that important cumulative action? This is what I'll be examining next!
But climate change is not a top priority for most people. This perturbs the effectiveness of individual action on mitigating climate change: if people don't care about the environment, they definitely won't alter lifestyle habits to reduce their impact on the Earth and we won't get the desired cumulative action.
Some have argued that education offers a way to solve this slack behaviour, using the linear ABC model:
A(ttitude) + B(ehaviour) = C(hange)
In this model, behaviour is believed to result from our attitudes, with an information deficit resulting in a lack of green behaviour; simply, educate people on climate change and they'll act accordingly. Humans are regarded to be rational actors, weighing evidence systematically and acting accordingly, but this may not be the case. I know people who acknowledge meat consumption has a detrimental impact on the environment, but they are not willing to reduce their meat intake.
This is called the value-action gap: people say they want to be green, but they don't act upon it, with their values rarely influencing actions. Encouraging behavioural change is generally hard and therefore, there is an unwillingness to produce effective awareness campaigns that attempt to generate attitude change - exactly what I found earlier!
So how do we address this? How do we produce that important cumulative action? This is what I'll be examining next!
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