When it comes to convincing citizens to make a commitment to the planet, setting an example or offering financial compensation remain the two most effective strategies, reports a vast meta-study conducted by an international team of researchers.
The study from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, Yale University in the United States, and Gothenburg University in Sweden suggests that encouraging people to recycle their waste in exchange for money, or challenging your neighbour to a game of “who’s greener?” will likely be more effective than pulling out the latest environmental report.
Published in the journal “PNAS”, the research compiles the results of more than 400 studies on the factors that encourage citizens to adopt environmentally responsible behaviours in their daily lives.
In total, six types of “interventions” were analysed, including actions to encourage recycling, sustainable mobility, and electricity savings.
One of the key findings is that citizens who took part in programmes aimed at raising their ecological awareness increased their pro-environmental behaviours by an average of 7%, compared with those who didn’t take part in such experiences.
This figure can be as high as 12% for some types of activity, especially in the field of waste recycling. While still a relatively low figure, it provides interesting insight into the effectiveness of methods aimed at convincing citizens to get involved.
“Interventions were found to be most effective in changing behaviours when based on social comparisons or financial incentives, but least effective when based on education or feedback alone,” the researchers noted.
The effect was found to be more pronounced for small-scale interventions – those involving fewer than 9,000 participants.
“One explanation for this may be that small-scale studies are more often based on direct techniques such as face-to-face interactions, which have a greater chance of influencing behaviour,” said study co-author Magnus Bergquist of the University of Gothenburg.
“Learning that people around us have started choosing vegetarian food or cycling to work, for example, is often a better motivation for getting people to change their behaviours.”
This idea is supported by research recently conducted by researchers from the University of Copenhagen. According to this study, it could be easier to convince people to eat vegetarian food by drawing on our own experience, rather than by presenting tangible facts about the climate crisis, such as the carbon impact of meat production on the planet.