Pro-environmental behavior is a person’s conscious choices that will minimize the negative impact of one’s own actions on the environment. It’s the way we live our everyday life and we try to adjust our behaviors towards living a more sustainable lifestyle. In this blog, I’ll be discussing the various ways we are trying to be pro-environmental and the different categories that can be applied to them.
We’re always adapting as human beings, trying to find the new way to help the ecosystem or find ways to spend less but get more use out of things, an example of something that we have started to adapt is the idea of electrical cars, an electrical car is usually either a hybrid or a fully electrical car that is using little to no fossil fuels which in turn will help the ecosystem and help us from polluting the world in such a fast rate. This is an example of one of the perceived risks that we see today.
Another barrier to pro-environmental behavior is the economy that we live in today, at the stage of the pandemic that we’re in we are finally starting to come back out of this tricky situation, but we still see those struggling, this is an economic factor that we see as a barrier to pro-environmental behavior, being that a lot of things that are to be good to start has a large startup cost and we see people being apprehensive in starting something because they’re not fully sure if they will get back their investment or time. The cost of being able to even support these new technologies makes it hard for a lot of people to even start to become pro-environmental.
We see a lot of barriers stopping us from becoming pro-environmental in-terms of household items and transport, but one big thing people are missing is that being educated about pro-environmental behavior in itself is something that can make an even bigger impact if everyone was to take their load and work on these behaviors as a whole community. I see this impact being done in my local community by seeing a lot of slogans and signs being put up about pollution and what websites can be used to learn more about these things, I see it being beneficial because a lot of people lack the constant reminder of doing these things. In the reference, it talks about the global change that can be done if we were to see the social influence in resource conservation (Steg, 2013)
References
Abrahamse, W., and Steg, L. (2013). Social influence approaches to encourage resource conservation: a meta-analysis. Glob. Environ. Change 23, 1773–1785. doi: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2013.07.029