Im personally keen on activism. But does it make a real difference to air pollution / the climate crisis?
The journal Scientific American (Sci. Am.) has reviewed this (i summarised their work here).
They say: governments and companies “need to do the lion’s share of the work”, but ordinary people also need to make changes in their everyday lives.
So: “how best to spur people toward more climate-[air quality]-friendly behaviours”?
First, i think, is underst
Though “education can be necessary to make the public aware of a problem in the first place, [they found] over and over again that it’s not very effective’ at actually changing behaviours.”
So maybe these posts wont make enough of a difference!
For people who are aware and interet
Sci.Am. found that “social pressure had the strongest effect on behavioural change. Such pressure can take passive forms, such as the sight of a larger number of our neighbours adding solar panels to their houses or purchasing electric cars, or more active ones, such as home energy reports that compare our energy use with our neighbours’.”
“People judge their own behaviour against what others are doing. There’s a strong tendency to conform to social norms … This social contagion is why it’s so important to talk about the climate actions you take.”
What behaviours are people likely to change?
The study also found that some behaviours were easier to change than others: “The behaviour most likely to be changed was littering. Transportation was the least likely to be altered. But even a relatively small rise in the percentage of people who use more climate-friendly transportation can reduce emissions more than a larger shift in behaviours such as recycling, which has a smaller effect on emissions.”
The researchers “say that different interventions can be combined to potentially move the needle even more on behavioural change, particularly because they can motivate different groups. ‘There’s so many routes to our goals … And we need to take advantage of all these different routes [to] reach different people’.”