A new ISER research project has been launched, looking at our attitudes and actions over green and environmental issues.
From issues as international as global warming and green energy to as local as recycling policies and composting, academics will analyse how we are changing in our environmental behaviours.
The study will provide new evidence on the impact of news stories in the media, of local authority messaging and public campaigning on the way individuals respond in their attitudes and actions, when it comes to acting greener, as well as our reactions combined with different life circumstances, moving home, having a family or retiring.
The distribution and dynamics of UK citizens’ environmental attitudes, behaviours and actions is a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under the Secondary Data Analysis Initiative and runs from January 2013 to June 2014. It uses Understanding Society, to analyse the environmental attitudes, behaviours, and actions of people living in the UK.
The research aims to provide policy makers seeking to legislate for and to encourage ‘environmentally-friendly’ attitudes and behaviours with a clearer understanding of what factors in people’s lives influence and shape how green they are in what they think and what they do.
The Department for Energy and Climate Change aims to reduce UK greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80% by 2050. To achieve this, people living in the UK will have to radically and permanently change their behaviour to use significantly less carbon-intensive products and services and to reduce overall energy demand
Energy overuse at the national level is both a direct and an indirect result of the millions of decisions made in homes across the UK. Directly through things like household energy and transport choices (how much gas and electricity we use, whether we take the car or travel by public transport) and indirectly through the consumption of goods and services provided by the industrial and service sectors.
Until now, the almost total absence of large scale longitudinal data in this field means that we know very little about the way in which attitudes, behaviours and actions change over time in the context of changes in a household, changes such as retirement, moving house, the birth of a child or the introduction of new ‘green’ technologies.
This project aims to see how these events and changes shape and influence environmental attitudes and actions.
In today’s Understanding Society podcast ISER Research Fellow Dr Simonetta Longhi who is leading the project discusses the research and the potential use of its findings.