6.2: Social Innovation- Get Personal, Go Local

Social transformation The 2015 Bending the Curve report’s second solution focuses on transforming social attitudes, norms, and behaviors around climate change, and cultivating support for the policies, technologies, and actions that are necessary to accelerate a low-carbon global economy:

Foster a global culture of climate action through coordinated public communication and education at local to global scales. Combine technology and policy solutions with innovative approaches to changing social attitudes and behavior.

In other words, innovations in technology and policy are not enough to change our world. They must be accompanied by social transformation at varying scales, from the global to the local, from the very wealthy to the very poor. From the perspective of climate justice, the wealthy global minority must change its energy consumption and production habits as well as invest in sustainable development across the globe. The vulnerable global majority must be welcomed into climate action less as voiceless recipients of charity than as active participants in solutions.

Just as we need innovative clean energy technologies, policies, and financial tools to bend the curve of greenhouse gas emissions downward, we also need innovative and ethical social technologies to change attitudes, norms, and behaviors regarding climate change and how to tackle it. Just as our new technologies must draw on the best science and our new policies must be grounded in the best economic and policy research, our social strategies need to be grounded in the best social science research on climate communication and climate education.

Changing hearts and minds is not easy. According to a 2017 Gallup poll, only 42% of Americans believe that climate change will pose a serious threat in their lifetimes. There is much public apathy and a human tendency to see other social and economic pressures, closer to home, as more urgent. There is also significant public hostility to the idea of climate change and the politicians and scientists who warn us about it. Willful misinformation and distortion in public discourse—often motivated and funded by those invested in the status quo—stoke this hostility. The orchestrated denial of science in recent years has obscured a clear message about the reality of climate change and its projected harms. Additionally, the politicized clustering of contentious social issues has undermined the formation of broader coalitions. Bundling climate change with other policy agendas like abortion, LGBTQ rights, and gun control has forced a wedge between otherwise potentially like-minded publics who could unite to conserve our Earth.

How do we intervene? How do we change attitudes and behaviors around climate change when there are so many conflicting agendas and ideologies, so many counterpressures and disincentives? Research on the most effective strategies of social transformation makes it clear that providing better information alone will not work. Changing attitudes and behaviors is not like pouring knowledge into an empty vessel. Educating people about the facts will not necessarily produce new attitudes and behaviors, since individuals live in social and political contexts in which their beliefs and behaviors are mediated by others. What those around us think and do has a great influence on what we think and do. Through his research, social psychologist Robert Cialdini shows that we must recognize the role that social norms play in motivating our beliefs and actions regarding many policy issues, including climate change.

Moreover, social science research demonstrates that when people understand precisely how climate change will affect their personal well-being, the well-being of their loved ones, and their own cities and neighborhoods, their minds open and their attitudes begin to change. Focus group research demonstrates that when people understand in more particular ways what’s at stake for them, they become more receptive to climate-friendly public policy. We will explore this focus group research further below, but for the climate communicator, it means that presenting climate change in terms of melting ice caps and polar bears far away will not have the same transformative impact on attitudes as emphasizing the local urgencies for a particular audience.

However, changing attitudes is not the same thing as changing behaviors. We need to distinguish them. How can people be moved from changing what they know to changing what they do? Social science has important things to say here. We will see in the same focus group research that attitudes are likelier to inspire new behaviors when concrete opportunities for local climate action are made apparent and available to people. The likelihood of behavioral change increases further when these pathways for action are collective and participatory in nature and pursued in concert with one’s friends and neighbors rather than individually.

In this section we will further explore the strategies of “getting personal” and “going local.” In our discussion of getting personal, we will consider public health and well-being as a lever for social transformation. In our discussion of going local, we will focus on cities as living laboratories for successful social transformation.

Get personal

Too many people today are insufficiently moved by climate science to support climate change mitigation policies, technologies, and actions. Too many people are also immune to the ethical imperatives of climate justice: that we must mitigate warming for the unborn and for the most vulnerable people on our planet. This book identifies what we might think of as “levers” that can be pulled to bend the curve of global warming. Is it possible to identify a lever to move people who are largely resistant to arguments based in science, ethics, or the public good? How do we rouse people from the status quo and move them to question political agendas and ideologies that deny the reality of climate change? Is it possible to instigate a change in attitudes, norms, and behaviors?

The 2015 Bending the Curve report explored the disproportionate public health impacts of climate change. But at that time, we had not yet investigated the value of public health predictions for communicating climate change. Public health itself can be a lever to change people’s minds and raise awareness about the urgent problems everyone on this planet is facing. Most individuals are typically most interested in what affects them, their families, and their communities. Most of the time, they are not motivated by the interests of others. One important reason why climate change has not gotten more social traction is because it can seem remote, spatially and temporally, from the everyday interests of most people. People are less likely to make personal sacrifices when climate change is framed as a threat to polar bears or to people on the other side of the planet.

To bring climate change home for people, we must show that its impacts are personal and highly relevant to an individual’s understanding of her own interests and well-being. The public health risks of a warming planet—which can cause stroke, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory disease, for example—make it clear that climate change will harm individuals all over the world. This knowledge will give those individuals reason to become personally invested in solutions.

As you know from reading this book, “mitigating climate change” should be synonymous in people’s minds with “preserving my health and well-being.” But this is not yet the case, and communicating it entails a strategic shift in the language we use to characterize the impacts of climate change. We need to shift from a collective, ethical language about the well-being of the planet and the commons to an individualist language about the well-being of the self—from a language of disproportionate impacts on the distant and the poor to a generalized language of public health risks for all. Even though we know that climate change disproportionately impacts the poor and vulnerable, it will nevertheless affect everyone. It is essential in our public communications to generalize impacts, to expand the circle of potential victimhood, and to stimulate a broader sense of public urgency. Because we are all in peril, regardless of our wealth and social position, public health becomes an important social lever for social change.

Figure 6.2.1 This image is from a protest that occurred in New York City while the COP21 meetings took place in Paris. The message here has been shifted from a conventional ethical mode (protect others, protect the environment) to a prudent mode—one should protect one’s own interests, the things that one loves. Photograph by Joe Brusky on Flickr.

The early modern idea of enlightened self-interest is instructive here. Economist Albert Hirschman characterized this idea as a substitute for ethics. Enlightened self-interest helps explain why individuals using reason sometimes sacrifice immediate pleasures for social or collective ends, even though they are not motivated by social or collective reasons to do so. There is a rational calculation behind such a tradeoff: an individual can be motivated to support climate-friendly policy, technologies, and actions through nothing but the prudent exercise of her own self-interest. Prudence in the pursuit of something one loves or wants can restrain present gratification (in this case, unimpeded energy consumption and carbon production) for a greater benefit in the future (health and well-being). Enlightened self-interest serves as a proxy for ethical motivation and demonstrates how individual and collective ends can converge.

Trade-offs are obviously not new to discussion about climate change solutions. The effectiveness of incentives—of using carrots rather than sticks to stimulate climate-friendly choices—is an important public policy lever. One of California’s sometimes controversial success stories (cap and trade) highlights the ethical compromises incentives always entail. Along these lines of thinking about carrots, we ought to think strategically about how to communicate the public health risks of climate change.

Faith leaders have sometimes been effective messengers about climate change, depoliticizing the issue through scriptural inspiration, respect for Mother Earth, and divine compassion for our fellow creatures. Religious communities can help to promote new social norms—an important dimension of sustainable behavioral shifts. Public health may have the capacity to transform attitudes and behaviors at even broader scales by moving people to protect what they love—not Mother Earth primarily, not all humanity primarily, but people’s personal well-being and the well-being of their families, friends, and communities (Figure 6.2.1).

To communicate the public health risks associated with climate change, perhaps doctors and health practitioners can be effective messengers. Perhaps they are less susceptible than politicians, journalists, scientists, and intellectuals to being characterized as biased in political rhetoric. They certainly are capable of engaging people where they are— in the intimacy of an examination room—and personalizing the impact of climate change. It may be that the general practitioner, the pediatrician, the obstetrician/gynecologist, the midwife, and the nurse practitioner are among our most important climate communicators and educators right now. This entails, then, that we shift how we train our health professionals today. Medical schools will need to become increasingly more collaborative, interdisciplinary, community engaged, and better insulated from corporate agendas. They need to commit themselves to integrating environmental health, education, and policy agendas more explicitly into their mission.

Go local

“Getting personal” has a lot to do with place. One way to get personal is to help people understand the risks of climate change for their own cities and neighborhoods. The social science research also tells us to “go local”: people are more receptive to climate-friendly public policy when they better understand the specific impacts of climate change on their own communities. A study of attitudes and behaviors among residents of low-lying coastal communities in south Florida, commissioned by the Union of Concerned Scientists, found that climate-friendly attitudes are likelier to take root when the impending negative effects of climate change are made concrete and relevant for people, rather than abstract like far-off melting ice caps and polar bears.

Figure 6.2.2 Miami Beach residents crossing flooded streets, an accelerating impact of sea level rise in south Florida. Photograph from siralbertus on Flickr.

Proximity matters! Focus group research has found, for example, that when people understand precisely how sea level rise will affect their own city, neighborhood, or block, their attitudes change (Figure 6.2.2). They are likelier to become receptive to the idea that global warming is a problem and supportive of local climate-friendly public policy. This is even true for a majority of individuals who describe themselves as politically conservative. This study also found that people are likelier to change their behaviors when concrete opportunities for local climate action are made available to them. Knowing the risks without having opportunities to act can produce paralysis.

When people are provided with pathways for action, they are likelier to act and to develop new habits of climate action. The likelihood of behavioral transformation increases when those opportunities for action are collective, participatory actions involving neighbors, friends, fellow congregants, and others in a person’s immediate social reference group. This research has been reinforced by the success of neighborhood-based participatory climate action projects across the world, documented by organizations like Climate Action Network International and the Climate Justice Alliance. These observations are also consistent with network theory in the social sciences, which claims that social behavior is infectious, that people are likelier to engage in a particular behavior when their social reference group (that is, their peers, friends, and neighbors) engages in that behavior. This is true of harmful behaviors like smoking and excessive drinking. But it is also true of positive, pro-social behaviors like seat belt usage, vaccination, and climate action.