New study finds that people listen to—and follow—expert climate advice. (Anthropocene Magazine)
Excerpt from this story from Anthropocene Magazine:
Members of the public are surprisingly willing to listen to and follow expert advice on which climate actions are most effective, according to a new study. The findings bode well for communication around voluntary abatement, or individual actions to reduce carbon emissions.
Voluntary abatement is an important complement to national governments’ emissions pledges, which so far at least aren’t sufficient to reach global climate targets set out in the Paris Agreement. But how do individuals figure out what to do? It’s hard for people who aren’t steeped in the intricacies of climate policy to get a handle on the tradeoffs involved and determine what will truly be effective.
Experts can help by providing advice, but people might tune out once things get complicated, or get turned off if they feel like they’re being lectured. “It is not straightforward how extensive expert advice would need to be to trigger behavioral change in individuals,” researchers write in the journal Scientific Reports. “If it is too short, it may not be convincing, whereas lengthy explanations might generate backlash.”
To figure out how to strike the right informational balance, the researchers offered 4,139 Germans participating in a larger public survey the opportunity to cancel carbon emissions permits known as European Union Alllowances (EUAs). Under the EU’s cap-and-trade carbon market, individuals can purchase emissions allowances and then cancel them, permanently reducing the total carbon budget.
But how to do this most effectively is complicated. Because of some regulatory mumbo-jumbo, cancelling an EUA immediately is less effective than delaying cancellation by a year or more. But this is not widely known, complicated to explain, and likely to be counterintuitive. Plus, there’s a lot of confusing information out there about EUA cancellations.
The researchers randomly sorted their participants into five groups and gave them varying choices in order to determine the minimum amount of information required to get people to reliably make effective emissions-reducing moves.
One group was simply asked to choose between cancelling an EUA or receiving an Amazon voucher worth 5 Euros. In this group, 386 of 491 people chose to cancel an EUA, setting the baseline of peoples’ “willingness to contribute.”
The second group was given the same choice but told they could choose to cancel the EUA immediately or in one year; the third group was given the same choices as the second but was told that delaying cancellation is more effective; the fourth group was given a detailed explanation of the benefits of delayed cancellation; and the final group was given this same detailed explanation but given the choice to delay cancellation for an unspecified period longer than a year (actually the most effective option, but the uncertainty can be difficult to wrap one’s mind around).
None of these other conditions had much effect on people’s willingness to choose the cancellation over the nominal Amazon voucher – a welcome bit of evidence that even complex and counterintuitive explanations don’t necessarily turn people off from climate action.
Not surprisingly, people are more likely to choose the delayed cancellation if they are told that this is more effective. In fact, this minimal advice yields the biggest bump in effectiveness of climate action. But, providing more advice did not produce a backlash: more extensive explanations produced even greater likelihood that people would make the most effective emissions-reduction choice, the researchers found.
