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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Barriers to pro-environmental behaviour | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_pro-environmental_behaviour | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T13:37:04.853257+00:00 | kb-cron |
Discredence barriers generally involve disbelief in environmental issues and/or distrust in government officials and scientists. Complete denial of climate change and other environmental issues is becoming less prominent, but it continues to persist. Skepticism is still apparent in countries where there are efforts to shape public opinion through mediums such as conservative think tanks and media outlets. Moreover, mass media is the primary source of information on climate change in many countries, therefore depending on the individual, they will either trust or ignore the information they receive which will vary from one media outlet to the next based on different views. Distrust in government has become a prevalent issue recently. In the United States for example, Americans have been polled every year about their confidence in their country's institutions (e.g. the Supreme Court, Congress, the Presidency, and the health-care establishment), and there has been a reported collapse in trust over time (12% in 2017). From an environmental standpoint, the first Trump administration has significantly diminished regulations that were put in place by the former administration to meet environmental standards. Examples of policy changes include pulling out of the Paris Agreement, loosening regulations on toxic air pollution, and issuing an executive order that called for a 30% increase in logging on public lands. There is a 97% scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, yet there is still not enough being done to meet global temperature targets of staying below a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase (see Paris Agreement).
Even in a stable constitutional republic, a cynical or unmoored citizenry presents an opportunity for demagogues and populists. As much as stagnant wages in former manufacturing regions, glaring economic inequality, or white backlash after the Obama Presidency, the country's disillusionment with institutions enabled Donald Trump's election.
=== Perceived risk === Risk perception barriers include worrying about whether financial or temporal investments will pay off. An example of a financial investment is solar panels which are initially costly. A temporal investment can simply be spending the time to do research on the topic instead of doing something else. There exists the concept of psychological distance, where people tend to discount future risks when making trade-offs between cost and benefits, and instead prioritize immediate day-to-day concerns. Spatial distance allows individuals to disregard any risks, and instead consider them more likely for other people and places than for themselves. This barrier can simply be thought of as "out of sight, out of mind." Additionally, people typically underestimate the likelihood of being affected by natural disasters, as well as the degree to which others are concerned about environmental issues. Furthermore, the human brain privileges experience over analysis: personal experiences with extreme weather events can influence risk perceptions, beliefs, behaviour and policy support, whereas statistical information by itself means very little to most people. It has been hypothesised many times that no matter how strong the climate knowledge provided by risk analysts, experts and scientists is, risk perception determines agents' ultimate response in terms of mitigation. However, recent literature reports conflicting evidence about the actual impact of risk perception on agents' climate response. Rather, a no-direct perception-response link with the mediation and moderation of many other factors and a strong dependency on the context analysed is shown. Some moderation factors considered as such in the specialised literature include communication and social norms. Yet, conflicting evidence of the disparity between public communication about climate change and the lack of behavioural change has also been observed in the general public. Likewise, doubts are raised about the observance of social norms as an influencing predominant factor that affects action on climate change. What is more, disparate evidence also showed that even agents highly engaged in mitigation (engagement is a mediation factor) actions fail ultimately to respond.
=== Limited behaviour === Limited behaviour barriers may include people choosing easier, yet less effective, pro-environmental behavioural changes (e.g. recycling, metal straws), and the rebound effect, which occurs when a positive environmental behaviour is followed by one that negates it (e.g. saving money with an electric car to then buy a plane ticket).
== Contextual barriers ==
=== Social and cultural factors === Research has also shown that how people support and engage in pro-environmental behaviour is also affected by contextual factors (i.e. social, economic, and cultural); people with diverse cultural backgrounds have different perspectives and priorities, and thus, they may respond to the same policies and interventions in different ways with regionally differentiated world views playing an important role. This means that people will use different excuses for their behaviours depending on contextual factors. Research has shown that information has a greater impact on behaviour if it is tailored to the personal situations of consumers and resonates with their important values. This suggests that, for example, policies developed to reduce and mitigate climate change would be more effective if they were developed specifically for the people whose behaviour they were targeting. People are social beings who respond to group norms: behaviour and decision-making has been shown to be affected by social norms and contexts. Demographic variables like age, gender and education, can have a variety of effects on pro-environmental behaviour, depending on the issue and context. However, when considering the effects of socio-demographics on individual perceptions of climate change, a recent study reported a meta-analysis which found that the largest demographic correlation with the belief of human-caused climate change is political affiliation (e.g. conservative views often mean less support for climate mitigation).