Environmental Behaviour and Actions

Understanding the Environment

• Understanding the environment informs our environmental behavior.
• Conceptualizations and paradigms influence how we behave towards the natural environment.
• Critique of the New Ecological Paradigm:
  • Connected understanding with nature has existed for millennia in indigenous cultures and ancient Western cultures.
  • The concept is responsive to the separation present within the West.
• Connected understanding:
  • Understanding that our actions affect the environment, which in turn affects us.
  • Treating the environment with care leads to a better state and safer lifestyles.
• Framings, discourses, interpretations impact our actions.
• Shift from focusing on how we think to focusing on how we act, our routines, and habits.
  • Much of our behavior is habituated and taken for granted.
  • A multi-pronged approach, connecting how we think with our daily routines, is advantageous for shifting environmental behavior.
  • Elizabeth Trove: A theorist associated with social practice theory.

Individual Action

• Discrepancy between perceived and actual impact of individual actions.
  • Recycling is perceived as highly impactful, but is ranked 60th in effectiveness.
  • Shifting to public transport is highly effective, but not recognized as such.
• Importance of educating ourselves on the impact of our choices.
• Despair inhibits action.
  • Hope encourages action, leading to change.
  • Negative associations with sustainable changes, such as reduced consumption and travel.
  • Consumer culture vs. meaningful activities.

Civil Action

• Successes in civil liberty areas (civil rights, female liberation, anti-war protests, gay pride movement).
• Environmental civil society movement:
  • A new kind of social movement, encompassing almost everybody.
  • Success requires determination and sustained pressure on governments and industry.
  • Success depends on time and convincing governments and industry to change course.
  • Achieving a critical mass of the public advocating for the same changes is essential.
• Diversity within the environmental movement:
  • Different groups have different priorities and discursive frames.
  • Examples:
    • Conservation: Conserving nature for its benefit and for future generations.
    • Deep ecology: Protecting nature for its own sake, not for human benefit. Associated with theorist Arne Naess.
    • Environmental justice: Focusing on the distribution of environmental harm among weaker or poorer populations.
    • Antiglobalization: Recognizing that global societal and economic structures contribute to the environmental crisis.
    • Preservation: Focusing on long-term protection of the environment.
    • Reform environmentalism: Changing societal structures to achieve necessary changes.
    • Environmental health: Recognizing the direct relationship between the health of the environment and human health.
• Strategies employed by civil action groups:
  • Bringing a sense of collective identity.
  • Pressuring governments and corporations.
  • Developing environmental consciousness.
  • Working through different kinds of networks.
  • Empowering local communities.
• The necessity of transforming the minority movement into a majority one and embedding social and economic attitudes and actions
• Vision creation:
  • Countering despair with a positive vision of the future.
  • Reinventing the idea of progress beyond technological innovations and consumption patterns.

Business Action

• Government parameters for businesses in Australia:
  • Emissions Reduction Fund: Providing funding for new practices and technologies to reduce emissions and store carbon. Carbon storage technologies are not very effective.
  • Climate Active: Encouraging carbon neutrality through certification.
  • Renewable Energy Target scheme: Encouraging electricity generation from renewables.
• Regulation-based expectations on businesses in Australia:
  • National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Scheme: Requiring accountability for emissions generation.
• Safeguard mechanism (SGM):
  • Applies to Australia's largest emitters to keep emissions below a limit that is lowered over time.
  • Expectations are not as high as they could be.
• UN Global Compact:
  • Businesses voluntarily sign up to align with Paris Agreement goals and the 2030 agenda of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Government Action

• Australians' level of concern about climate change:
  • Peaked in 2021-2022, with a majority being very or fairly concerned.
  • Diminished slightly in recent years due to factors like COVID, wars, and cost of living crisis.
  • Still a majority of Australians are concerned.
• Public sentiment in Australia (2022 data):
  • 80% agree climate impacts should be considered when approving fossil fuel projects.
  • 79% support phasing out coal-fired power stations.
  • 76% rank solar in their top three energy sources.
  • 62% support a levy on fossil fuel exports to fund climate adaptation.
  • 57% support dropping new coal, oil, and gas projects.
• Most recent poll (2024 data):
  • 64% think the federal government should take action to transition away from fossil fuels by 2026.
  • 70% support implementing a polluter pays mechanism.
  • 75% agree climate policy should be based on best practice science.
  • 75% agree that members of independent agencies advising the government should not be employed by affected organizations.
• Government commitments:
  • 43% reduction by 2030 and net-zero by 2050.
• Concerns:
  • Continued approval of new fossil fuel developments despite calls to stop.
  • New fossil fuel projects are for export, with emissions not counted onshore.
  • Submitted projects would equate to carbon levels 10 times greater than Australia's remaining carbon budget.
  • In the 2021-2022 budget, the government used taxpayer money to subsidize the fossil fuel industry by over $11,000,000,000$.
• Discrepancy between safeguard mechanism coverage and emissions from new fossil fuel projects.
• New coal approvals in 2024 (Caval Ridge, Bulgabri, and Lake Vermont) would produce nearly a billion tonnes of emissions, despite diminishing markets.
• Government is committed to ramping up gas projects through 2050, with 90% of Australia's gas exported overseas for profitability.
• Potential for the Australian government to reintroduce a carbon tax (like in 2012-2014) set at the same rate as the EU.
• The gap between what the Australian public wishes to see and the actions the current government is taking.
• Governments must be informed by science, the UN, and regular evaluations undertaken by the public.
• The need to keep the government accountable.

Citizens' Assemblies

• Citizen Assemblies often consensual despite diversity.
• Deliberation generates greater awareness and more responsiveness to future generations.
• Case studies:
  • Belgium: Citizens Council with 24 members decides topics of investigation and makes policy recommendations, to which the government is legally obliged to respond.
  • France: Citizens Convention on Climate comprised of 150 citizens that defined a series of measures to achieve a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
  • UK: Climate Assembly with 110 citizens to consider how the UK government could meet its net-zero target by 2050.
• Many governments are hesitant to truly respond to what the citizens are saying, and there is a lack of meaningful uptake.
• Internet technology has great capacity to facilitate more meaningful engagement by citizens on every policy decision, and there is a need to facilitate stronger alliances between governments and the whole community.
• Examples:
  • Engage Victoria (Australia): Website for public submissions in response to government proposals.
  • The degree to which the public's response is considered isn't clear.

Re-Empowering Government

• Changes needed require re-legitimizing the role of government, which has been disputed and downgraded since the turn of the 1980s to better reflect green economic principles.
• Government has been weakened because they've been co-opted by business and industry.
• Truncated view of their responsibility in managing the transition, in which they focus their entire attention on creating the conditions in which low and zero carbon technologies, goods, and services will prosper on the market, which is ignoring the setting of proper conditions for speeding up the phasing out of unsustainable practices.
• Responsibility of the state is to redefine progress by fixing new limits to carbon emissions, pollution, waste, etc.
• Limits on consumption and their control must be well understood and accepted by the community to stand a chance of receiving social legitimization such as of millionaires and the wealthier consuming the vast majority of carbon emissions.

Multilateralism

• National governments aligning themselves with other national governments to become stronger in the face of transnational corporations to encourage companies operating in countries to do the right thing with their carbon emissions. The shift away from that multilateralism position can be really helpful and effective

Final

• David Suzuki quoting Al Gore on the research that there is a critical point at which the addition of one more grain of sand causes avalanches, slides, and massive changes. Each person, group, or organization working towards a different world may seem powerless and insignificant, but all of them can add up to a force that can become irresistible.