My mom is a really good doctor.
Growing up she would always talk to me and my siblings about social determinants of health, the non-medical factors that can affect a person's health and well-being, the upstream problems that caused her patients to be sick in the first place.
And while she was a great primary care doctor, she understood that in order to truly help her patients, there needed to be a behavior change that took place outside of the hospital.
To achieve a healthy lifestyle, her patients would first have to shift the way they acted around food, exercise, time, etc.
I think the same is true in the world of environmental conservation.
Climate change and biodiversity loss are not the true problems in our environment today. They are simply the symptoms of upstream issues.
Plastic pollution, deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, habitat loss, overfishing, the list of destructive behavior goes on and on.
But just as my mom recognized the importance of addressing the underlying issues affecting her patients' health, we must identify and address the systemic problems driving environmental degradation.
Taking a quote from the book, Making Shift Happen, “no one wakes up in the morning hoping for bad news about the planet. Yet despite this, we consistently act in ways that are detrimental to the environment and ourselves.”
That is because we are dealing with a behavioral problem.
If we want a healthier world, we have to change the way we act first.
Why Behavior Change Is Important?
Behavior change is the process of modifying an individual's actions, attitudes, or habits. It involves altering patterns of behavior over time to achieve specific goals or outcomes.
In this post, we are talking specifically about behavior change for environmental conservation.
As we talked about above, it is clear that the average global behavior of humans is very contrary to the conservation and preservation of the natural world.
For some of us, it is a cultural thing.
BBQ is a huge thing in Texas (my home state), making a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle extremely difficult to maintain even though it is drastically better for the global environment.
For others, it is an economic thing.
From a consumption standpoint, the more affordable the consumer good is, the more likely it will come with some sort of disposable plastic container or wrapping. In many cases, choosing sustainable options for food, packaging, energy, or transportation is only available to those who have enough resources to live that way.
But regardless of the reason, it all boils down to behavior. There is plastic in the ocean because we don’t recycle. There is plastic in the ocean because we buy plastic products. There is plastic in the ocean because congressional decision-makers decided to support the oil and gas industry.
And that is where behavior change comes into play.
Instead of getting caught up with the symptoms, by targeting the behavior first, the downstream problems will fix themselves.
For example, The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit environmental engineering organization that develops technology to extract plastic pollution from the oceans and capture it in rivers before it can reach the ocean.
This sounds like a revolutionary organization, right?
As of April 2024, The Ocean Cleanup collected over 30 MILLION pounds of plastic from rivers and oceans around the world.
This work is incredibly important.
But here’s where downstream problem-solving gets tricky.
If we never stop the flow of plastic in the first place, not only will The Ocean Cleanup be stuck trying to catch plastic in rivers forever, but hundreds of millions of greenhouse gasses will keep being released to produce this plastic, landfills will continue to overflow, and we will continue to be stuck in an extractive, destructive, unsustainable cycle.
Forever.
Attacking the problem at its root is the only effective way to end plastic pollution for good.
The Four Pillars of Behavior Change
Just like with any kind of complex problem, effective behavior change requires a multi-faceted approach.
The multi-faceted approach that we are going to be looking at in this study involves 4 pillars to effective behavior change: psychology, communication, policy, and design.
While each of these pillars have a unique capacity to alter and shift behaviors, especially for environmental conservation-focused behavior change strategies, they work most effectively in tandem.
Understanding how people think, feel, and act is essential for crafting messages that resonate, designing environments that support desired behaviors, and implementing policies that drive positive change.
Psychology
While this might be fairly intuitive, understanding human behavior is essential for successful behavior change.
By diving into the motivations, emotions, and cognitive processes that drive people's actions we can identify barriers to change and develop strategies to overcome them.
Communication
Effective communication is the cornerstone of behavior change.
More than just creating cool graphics or videos, communication for behavior change involves identifying key audiences and crafting messages that resonate with them specifically. This pillar of behavior change focuses on how to inform, persuade, and motivate people to adopt new behaviors.
Policy
Policy often gets a bad PR. Most people aren’t the biggest fans of rules and regulations.
But the reality is that large-scale behavior change without policy change rarely works in the long run.
Policy sets the stage for behavior change by creating incentives that encourage desired behaviors.
Design
Design plays a crucial role in influencing behavior. It encompasses creating environments and experiences that nudge people towards desired actions.
This pillar focuses on how to use design principles to shape behavior in a positive way.
By effectively combining these four elements, it's possible to create comprehensive and impactful behavior change initiatives.
Going From Here
To address and tackle the critical problems of today and achieve resilient change for the future, we must map solutions based on how people think, make decisions, and act.
This is behavior change.
Over the next several weeks I am going to be exploring more about how behavior change can be used for environmental conservation, key tactics to achieving successful behavior change, and how related topics, such as psychology, communications, policy, and design, can support behavior change.
If we change our behavior today, we can create a better tomorrow.
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