Comment: Is ‘behaviour change’ a contentious topic or an essential part of net zero?

As countless analyses have shown, individual behaviours matter for reducing carbon emissions.

For those with high carbon footprints – which are driven by wealth and disposable income – reducing per capita emissions from lifestyle choices is an essential part of the low-carbon transition. The carbon footprints of the top 10%, 5% and especially 1% of earners matter in-and-of themselves.

But perhaps because of the skewed distribution of consumption emissions, the idea of individuals making choices to adjust or moderate their own behaviours remains controversial. Governments are instinctively nervous about being accused of over-reach, or of covertly attempting to influence people’s decisions.

Some of the earliest campaigns to raise awareness of climate change with the public focused on ‘simple and painless’ steps that people could take, but in equating these changes with the magnitude of the challenge of climate change, arguably trivialised the nature of the challenge. At the same time, there is evidence of oil and gas companies using the concept of individual carbon footprints to distract attention from the systemic causes of climate change – i.e. their extraction of fossil fuels in the first place.

Systemic changes and behavioural changes are not mutually exclusive – and can instead be considered ‘two sides of the same coin’. But there is a strong critique of focusing on individual carbon footprints from within the climate movement – arguing that the focus should be kept on the root causes of the problem (i.e. fossil fuels, not the decisions people make in their own lives).

People are ‘agents of change’ across the breadth of their lives: as peers, colleagues, decision makers and voters. Crucially, emissions reductions from those with the freedom and means to adjust their lifestyles send a powerful social signal that change is possible and responsibility will be fairly shared.

Much of the path to net zero now involves securing the buy-in of the general public, including willingness to change behaviours. Across diet, travel and energy use, there are differing levels of support for behavioural change.

Although food choices are closely linked to people’s identities, and there have been attempts to cultivate ‘culture war’ debates around the prospect of taxation on meat, in fact there is generally more support than opposition for shifting diets among the UK population.

For those who fly regularly, though, there is less evidence that habits or attitudes are shifting. So the idea of ‘behaviour change’ (like the wider net zero conversation) is something that is grounded in specific situations and conditions.

What matters is not only the willingness people indicate to change their own behaviours but also their capacity/ability to make changes (many people do not need to reduce the amount they fly, for example, because they already fly infrequently) and the factors that sit behind individual behaviour choices: people’s values, their sense of identity and the social cues they receive from friends and peers around them.

Resources like Britain Talks Climate (based on the varying ‘core beliefs’ that different ‘Britain’s Choice’ audience segments hold) provide the sort of nuanced guidance required for behavioural campaigns to land effectively: there is no one-size-fits-all message on shifting behaviours on the path to net zero.