The prospects of transition to sustainability from the perspective of environmental values and behaviors in the EU 27 and globally

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to identify the present potential for transition to sustainability in industrialized economies by analyzing environmental values and behaviors obtained from public opinion studies. Semiotics is used in the reconstruction of values from attitudinal data obtained in the European Union (EU) 27 and the US. The relationship between environmental values, attitudes, and behaviors is theoretically framed with the aid of specification hierarchy theory (Salthe SN. 1993. Development and evolution: complexity and change in biology. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press). The results, represented in the Environmental Values and Behavior Matrix, suggest that on average people did not start yet to question seriously about their consumption habits and lifestyles in the context of sustainability. The diffusion of environmental values in observed populations of EU 27 and in the US is relatively low and, consequently, people's actions in preserving the environment are mostly low-effort and low-scale. This result is congruent with other empirical data obtained globally. The main findings indicate that the extant state of distribution of environmental values and behaviors in the EU, US, and, indeed, globally shows a weak potential for transition to sustainability or to any kind of ‘green economy’.

Keywords:

• environmental values and behaviors
• worldview
• public opinion surveys
• sustainability

Acknowledgements

I thank Stanley Salthe for his valuable inputs regarding specification hierarchy, Ivana Logar for her extensive comments that helped to improve the text, Senka Brajović for her discussion of attitudes and behaviors, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Note that natural, local, and climate variations that are experienced during one's lifetime are not perceived as ‘climate change’, which denotes statistically significant variation in the mean state of the climate or its variability caused primarily by anthropogenic activities with invariably negative connotations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change).

2. This type of interpretant does not limit itself to identifying the interpreted, but rather expresses its properly pragmatic meaning (Petrilli 2010, p. 244–246).

3. Stanley Salthe, personal communication.

4. The existence of a dominant worldview does not imply that everyone adopt it – at any time there are a variety of alternative worldviews in a society that challenge the prevailing one (Matutinović 2007a).

5. Takács-Sánta (2007): conjectured that ‘ … a long-lasting decrease in environmental impact without serious negative consequences can only be achieved in contemporary Western societies if the environmental concern of the majority of people reaches a high level’. We can start thinking about majority once a certain cultural trait is shared by over 50% of the population, and, therefore, I divided the matrix on the vertical axis at the value of 50.

6. See, for example, how Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org, and The Encylopedia of Earth, http://www.eoearth.org, as two public references of general scope, define water pollution and which connotations appear first in the text.

7. Industrial accidents and incidents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Industrial_accidents_and_incidents

8. The respondents were asked: ‘When people talk about “the environment,” which of the following do you think of first?’ Only 8% did select ‘man-made disasters’ as their first choice from the list of environmental issues. I infer that their primary focus is then on the negative effects that industrial accidents and major oil spills have on human health and subsistence (e.g. destroyed fisheries). This inference is supported by the fact that respondents ranked on top ‘pollution in towns and cities’ as their first thought when talking about environment – an issue that primarily affects human health (Eurobarometer 2008).

9. Because average values may be misleading if there is a significant variance in a population, I checked tables showing individual countries results (Eurobarometer 2008). Although there is significant variance among results, as one would expect in a vastly different group of EU 27 members, I did not find a single country which would stand out of the pattern shown in Figure 2 in terms of having a better positioning in the upper-right quadrant.

10. GfK Roper Green Gauge Global 2010 was conducted in 2010, using nationally representative samples (N ≈ 1000) in 26 countries: USA, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, UK, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Russia, Egypt, South Africa, Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand – in total 37.211 respondents, aged 15+.

11. The list of top 10 global concerns: (1) recession & unemployment, (2) inflation and high prices, (3) enough money to live right and pay the bills, (4) crime and lawlessness, (5) environmental pollution, (6) educational quality, (7) cost of health care, (8) wrongdoing/corruption of elected government officials, (9) the future of the retirement or pension plan provided by our government, and (10) global climate change/global warming (GfK 2010b).

12. Alternative explanation is that people choose the pro-environmental behaviors that demand the least cost in a broader psychological sense that includes, among other factors, the time and effort needed to undertake a pro-environmental behavior (Diekmann and Preisendoerfer 1992, in Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002). However, also the least-cost hypothesis implies an environmental attitude that commands behavioral ‘parsimony’.

13. This conclusion does not underestimate the positive effects of various public inducements, like green taxes or subsidies for making public transport more efficient, on pro-environmental behaviors. This aspect of environmental policy is complementary to the above-mentioned strategy.