How to make an unwilling population go green
Posted by DavidM in Buying green | 6 May 2008
Ben on the WinACC forum posted a link to an interesting report published by DEFRA with a diagram of the highest impact changes people can make matched to their willingness to do them.
Wasting less food, better energy management, responsible water usage and increased recycling are all high impact but also most likely to be adopted.
However, while lower impact diet, unneccessary flights and lower car usage all have a big potential impact, people's willingness to adopt such measures is low. This led me to think there are two courses of action needed to move the mass of people towards a more environmentally sound lifestyle.
First, they should be encouraged directly to make the changes they are most willing to. Recycling, using low energy light bulbs, insulating their homes, getting water butts and compost bins are all being righty pushed. These are activities anyone can undertake, don't need to cost much (indeed will save you money) and don't compromise an existing lifestyle.
Second, legislation should be used to address the less palatable actions. Instead of encouraging people to fly less we need to make flying less impactful - either by lowering the per-flight impact or restricting the availability of flights. Instead of trying to get a nation of petrol-heads out of their cars we need to improve the fuel economy and emissions of cars.
Alongside all this we need to continually raise awareness of the dangers we face from climate change to shift the level of understanding and people's likelihood to adopt actions to reduce their individual impact.
