COP26 - Tackling the Climate Crisis with Individual Change

In the context of COP26, we've interviewed Stuart Capstick about the fundamental role of individual change in tackling the climate crisis. Stuart Capstick is the deputy director of CAST, the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations, based at Cardiff University, where he focuses on the public understanding of climate change and ways to engage people with the transformations needed to achieve emissions reduction.

BEHAVEN — Hi Stuart, can you please introduce yourself and tell us more about your area of expertise?

STUART CAPSTICK — Of course! I'm Dr Stuart Capstick. I'm the Deputy Director of the Centre for Climate and Social Transformations (CAST) based at Cardiff University, which is a 5-year, £5m investment from the ESRC i.e. the Economic and Social Research Council. I am also working closely with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. 

My background is in psychology, with a focus on the public perceptions of climate change and the links between perception and behaviour. Over the last two years, I've become more and more interested in the ways in which our personal individual actions have ripple effects and are thus connected to a wider social change. 

How will you be involved in COP26? 

We've noticed over the years that there isn't enough discussion around lifestyle change and public participation at the COP. Most of the focus is at the legal, technological and land-use levels. We hope to bring forward important content around the involvement of the public through our events. That’s why our events will be mainly focused on public engagement in tackling climate change. 

We will particularly highlight the need for public participation, and social and lifestyle change to hit our emissions targets and build low-carbon societies. In a recent report, Dr Lewis Akenji, who is the director of the Hot or Cool Institute in Berlin and one of our speakers, explains that to reach those objectives, lifestyles need to change, and particularly the lifestyles of those on higher incomes in the Global North, who have a high carbon footprint. I think this is a very important message to communicate during COP26 because I'm worried that people — in government or negotiated circles — are afraid to talk about this skew towards certain groups. And because of this, I don't think we're anywhere near tackling the need for a fundamental lifestyle change and changing how our societies are structured.

We will also be bringing together speakers from Canada, India, and the UK. We’ll go into the details of people's levels of concern about climate change with Dr Katharine Steentjes from CAST. We’ll talk about grassroots innovations for change with Vanessa Timmer. And Susie Wang from Climate Outreach will be speaking on ways of communicating and engaging people about climate change.

What are your views on this year's goals at the COP26, i.e. mitigation, adaptation, finance and collaboration?

From what I've heard about finance, it's an unfortunate and unedifying wrangling between those who are supposed to be paying for things and those who don't want to. It's either going to be one of the biggest successes or failures at COP, in my view. On mitigation, the frustrating thing is moving from targets, declarations and Nationally Determined Contributions to actually making it happen on the ground. 

What would be the proportion of individual change versus the proportion of technological change needed to achieve a climate transition in your opinion? 

That's a really hard question because it depends on what is meant by individual change. If we assume that society remains largely as it is but that we can perhaps make a difference by behaving differently in a few specific ways, then behaviour change is relevant but only of limited relevance. However, if we assume that behaviour change on an individual level is a catalyst for a bigger, societal change, then I think individual action can make a huge difference. 

For instance, there could be excellent investment and technology in solar panels and people might agree that solar panels are a technological solution to climate change. But if they don't put it on their houses or if it's not used to generate electricity, it's not relevant. 

But I fear that there is a bit of a backlash against the idea that people and the public have a role in this because behaviour change has come to be thought of as an individual, small scale and trivial consumer action. Whereas actually, I think it can be much more than that. And it can be part of that bigger sweep towards change. Take the example of plant-based diets. There's not actually been many, if any, policies that have encouraged people to make the shift towards plant-based diets, aside from a little bit of health messaging. But there's been a big shift over the last decade towards plant-based diets.

And why is that? Because people have chosen to eat differently and, by making that choice, helped shift the cultural and social norms around plant-based diets. This in turn feeds into what manufacturers supply and what supermarkets put on their shelves, which again results in more choices for people. Individual choice and behaviour feed into that much bigger picture of how society changes.

How important are communities vs individuals when we talk about behaviour change? Should we be focusing on communities at all?

Yes, I think so. One of the overarching problems of climate action is that it’s this huge, vast, wicked international problem. And when it's reduced to the individual level, it's not surprising that we feel quite overwhelmed and like a drop in the ocean. 

In this regard, I think one of the difficulties with the behaviour change agenda in environmental psychology is that it has been quite individualistic. And ‘you as an individual’ is quite an isolating thing. Even the models of behaviour are very much about my attitudes, my perception, even social norms are the individual's perceptions of things. So it does require a shift in thinking to perceive communities as being the unit of analysis. And I do think there is a lot of scope for interventions at the community level. 

The idea that the responsibility of societal change should be solely placed on the government and on innovation still largely persists. How do we change this narrative? 

Part of the problem has been that people like to draw attention to the fact that there are these unethical, nefarious bad actors who are trying to push individual action to detract from the responsibility of governments, businesses, etc.

Now, that may be true but that doesn't mean that we have no role to play. And what worries me is that it's a very disempowering message. Yes, we need system change but how is that going to happen if people don't push for it? Especially in societies where democracy exists in one form or another, citizens should be in a position to push their governments for change. Individual action isn't always thought of in these political terms. 

Personally, I think one of the most significant things we can do as individuals are those public sphere behaviours — as it's often called in environmental psychology — voting, activism, pressuring, etc.

We really have to be mindful of the fact that as people, as citizens, we are part of giving any social license or withdrawing any social license for these policies and businesses to operate.

If citizens need to push for system change which in turn results in large scale societal changes, should behaviour change interventions be more focused on increasing activism?

I think that's a really good point and it runs counter to the idea of ‘nudges’ that lead you to do certain things without even knowing, without having any motivation for it, and just because you’ve been prodded in the right direction. 

If what we're hoping for is that people will become engaged, passionate or even angry in wanting to make those big changes, then pushing activism is certainly important. The social identity model of collective action on climate change looks at participation in activism and social movements through a psychological lens. It’s quite a different way of looking at how we are involved in pushing for climate action than ‘attitude leading to behaviour’.

What role could researchers play in this? 

I think researchers have different sorts of relationships with activism, depending on their own personal outlook on life, their own assumptions, etc. Personally speaking, I think that the climate emergency is so terrifying and urgent that I don't have time to just do my research, leave it in a journal and hope that someone will pick it up. I'd rather publish a briefing paper or give a talk or have a conversation with someone that could maybe lead to some positive change somewhere.

Any way in which we can, as researchers, either professionally or even outside of what we do professionally get stuck into pushing for change, the better. That's something we try and do in the CAST centre. 

What are your thoughts on the fact that fairer consumption could lead to happier and healthier lifestyles?

From what I found in my research, living in a sustainable way is perfectly compatible with being happy. There are also some fascinating studies that look at the relationship between material consumption and happiness. There's this idea of sufficiency coming through the literature, emphasizing that owning the very basic material things, is sufficient to make us happy. A real tragedy in the world today is that so much of the consumption, so much of the fossil fuel burning, doesn't actually contribute to wellbeing and happiness. We tend to assume, in our dominant way of thinking about society and economics, that more consumption, more grasping, more owning are the roots of happiness. When they’re not.

It comes down to trying to rethink our priorities and what it is we're trying to get out of our societies and out of our own individual lives. We have a limited carbon budget so do we, as a world, continue to use that in ways that are largely pointless? Because it's the people who already have plenty who currently consume more, and they’re not getting any happier from it. Should that carbon budget be reserved for people and parts of the world that need that sort of development? Unfortunately, rethinking this does run counter to some really deep-rooted ideas about what governments want to strive for in society, i.e. measures of GDP and growth etc. This really should prompt deeper questions, but I don't think COP has the scope to address this.

Do you have papers or books that you would suggest or even experts that we should look into concerning this topic?

Kimberly Nicholas' book called 'Under the Sky We Make' is a great read! I'd recommend the book ‘Being the Change’ by Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA, and activist. Lastly, Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist who works in the spaces of climate scepticism and denialism, wrote a very interesting book ‘Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided Work’ which is worth looking into as well!

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More about CAST: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/psychology/research/social-and-environmental/centre-for-climate-change-and-social-transformations-cast

More about the Hot or Cool Institute’s report: https://hotorcool.org/1-5-degree-lifestyles-report/

More about the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: https://www.thelancet.com/countdown-health-climate

Under the Sky We Make, by Kimberly Nicholas: https://www.kimnicholas.com/under-the-sky-we-make.html

Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution, by Peter Kalmus: https://peterkalmus.net/books/

Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided Work, by Katharine Hayhoe: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Saving-Us/Katharine-Hayhoe/9781982143831