Do shrinks hold the key to tackling climate change traumas?

Businesses could benefit from employing environmental psychologists to help them design and market their products and services.

According to a taskforce from the American Psychological Association (APA), which presented its findings at the body's 117th Annual Convention in Toronto last week, the key agents driving climate change - population growth and energy consumption - are behavioural and can be changed. However, the taskforce warned that various psychological factors are stopping many North American citizens from changing their negative behaviour and reducing their contribution to climate change.

One of the main problems is that, while many people believe climate change to be an important issue, they do not see it as an immediate threat, and as a result there is no sense of urgency to tackle the situation.

This lack of urgency results from a range of underlying feelings, the taskforce said. The first is uncertainty, which reduces the number of occasions in which people are prepared to take positive action. Another issue is mistrust, whereby citizens are sceptical of messages concerning the risks that are being put forward by government officials or scientists.

The group warned that people are also guilty of undervaluing climate change risks. A study of more than 3,000 people in 18 countries found that a substantial proportion believe that environmental conditions will not worsen for another 25 years, which leads them to conclude that action can be taken later rather than sooner.

Denial is also a major issue, according to the ASA, which cited a range of polls indicating that a substantial minority of the population is unconvinced that climate change is taking place or that human activity has anything to do with it. Moreover, others feel that any action they take will be too small to make a real difference and so do nothing.

The taskforce concluded that the final and most important factor is simply habit. The challenge here is that ingrained behaviour is slow and difficult to alter on a permanent basis.

But the taskforce indicated that a psychological understanding of these barriers can be used productively to generate positive change. For example, when energy-efficient appliances were redesigned to show people directly how much power and money was conserved by only using them when needed, the outcome was energy savings of between five and 12 per cent.

"Behavioural feedback links the cost of energy use more closely to behaviour by showing the costs immediately or daily rather than in an electric bill that comes a month later," explained Janet Swim, a member of the taskforce who is based at Pennsylvania State University.

Other research showed that strong financial incentives combined with high-impact social issue-based marketing campaigns and careful attention to customer convenience and quality assurance issues encouraged 20 per cent of citizens in a given community to weather-proof eligible homes in the first year of the initiative. A second scheme, which focused purely on financial incentives, was considerably less effective, however.

As a result, the report concluded that governments and businesses seeking to change behaviour should try to combine a number of different techniques, including campaigns specifically designed to address psychological barriers to behaviour change.

"Many of the shortcomings of policies based on only a single intervention type such as technology, economic incentives or regulation may be overcome if policy implementers make better use of psychological knowledge," it said.

Although environmental psychology emerged as a sub-discipline in the early 20th century, it did not gain momentum until the 1980s. But the study indicated that it would now be beneficial to broaden the area out to include other psychological fields.

"The expertise found in a variety of fields of psychology can help find solutions to many climate change problems right now," said Swim. "For example, experts in community and business psychology can address the behavioural changes necessary as businesses and non-profits adapt to a changing environment."