Celebrating Environment Day≠ Behavior Change for the Environment
Hello! I am Madhuri Karak, the Community Engagement Lead at Rare’s Center for Behavior & the Environment. This is June’s snapshot of behavioral insights applied in the environmental field for Habit Weekly, a weekly newsletter for everyone interested in behavioral design. Subscribe here.
June 5 is World Environment Day. Dedicated by the UN to promoting awareness and action for the environment, it comes six weeks after Earth Day which is celebrated on April 22.
Is it unreasonable to ask what these designated ‘days’ do? To what degree has pro-environmental public outreach been successful in achieving the adoption of pro-environmental attitudes and actions? After all, the global community has been celebrating both Earth and Environment Days with fanfare since the 1970s.
Educational environmental activities have a dismal track record for producing ecologically conscious citizens. Researchers Harold Hungerford and Trudi Volk’s 1990 paper on why learners don’t act on the basis of what they know is, in 2021, still insightful:
Nothing moves humans less towards action for the environment than dry greenhouse gas emissions data and biodiversity loss statistics. What moves us to bridge the gap between knowing and doing?
1. Our desire to keep up with the Joneses is a strong motivation.
Seeing neighbors’ solar panels on their rooftops ignites what economist Robert Frank calls “behavioral contagion,” sparking adoption of solar panels when awareness of renewable energy availability had not.
2. Appealing to values that aren’t explicitly about the environment
Making it about capital ‘E’ Environment can sometimes be less impactful than appealing to inclusive values. Altruistic notions of community, justice, and equality encourage lower-carbon lifestyles in addition to highlighting the connection between pro-environmental behaviors and community well being more broadly.
3. Making the ‘green’ option the default option
Finally, a field trial in Germany has proven the efficacy of default settings. Household energy consumers in the trial consistently selected the ‘green’ option if it was the easier option even when they knew it was more expensive.
For more on how we can complement the awareness-centric ‘tell them’ approach of traditional environmentalism with behaviorally informed strategies, check out Rare’s behavioral levers framework.
This column appears first in Habit Weekly, a newsletter for everyone interested in behavioral design. Subscribe here.
While behaviorally-informed interventions are relatively widespread in public health, policymaking and marketing, environmental practitioners still rely heavily on information-based awareness campaigns and rules/regulations to enact change.
So how can we promote plant-rich diets, conserve natural resources, encourage the adoption of renewables, and address the myriad environmental challenges we face today? ‘People and Nature’ is bringing you snapshots from the growing application of behaviorally-informed insights in the environmental field.
