Climate policies that target individual lifestyle changes – such as banning cars from city centres – can unintentionally weaken public support for environmental actions, a new study published in the Nature Sustainability journal has found.
According to the study, An empirically based dynamic approach to sustainable climate policy design, which was authored by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute, poorly-developed mandates can weaken peoples’ environmental values, even among those that try to adhere to a green lifestyle.
Underlying values
“Policies don’t just spur a target behavior. We find that they can change people’s underlying values: leading to unintended negative effects, but also possibly cultivating green values,” commented SFI complexity postdoctoral fellow Katrin Schmelz, the study’s lead author.
Schmelz, a behavioural economist and psychologist, began gathering data for the study while at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She and SFI Professor and economist Sam Bowles surveyed more than 3,000 German citizens about climate policies, and, for the purposes of comparison, COVID-19 policies.
As the study found, when climate policies are perceived as intrusive or restrictive, they may erode environmental values, rather than strengthen them, as an individual’s aversion to control ‘crowds out’ their existing green motivations.
“These crowding-out effects are big enough that policymakers should worry,” Bowles commented.
Climate mandates
Another interesting takeaway from the report was that climate mandates received a 52% greater negative response than COVID-19 mandates.
“We saw incredible hostility in the US and other countries towards controls during the COVID-19 pandemic, hindering the implementation of much-needed public policies,” Bowles added. “It looks like the climate case could be much worse.
“The science and technology to provide a low-carbon way of life is nearly solved. What’s lagging behind is a social–behavioural science of effective and politically viable climate policies.”
Not all the findings were negative, however, with the study also noting that mandate resistance was less impactful among people that felt that policies were effective, did not limit freedom of choice, and were not intrusive. In addition, the availability of practical alternatives was an important factor.
“People also respond much more positively if they don’t feel that a policy restricts their freedom – so in Germany, there is less opposition to limitations on short-haul flights compared to other policies, and this may be because the European train network provides an adequate alternative,” Schmelz added. Read more here.
