Barriers to pro-environmental behaviour
Structural barriers are external and often impossible for an individual to control, such as lack of governmental action, or locality of residence that promotes car dependency as opposed to public transit.
Other psychologists have argued that the attempt to identify psychological barriers to environmental behavior is problematic when used to explain societal inaction on climate change.
[3][6][7] For those who are aware of current environmental issues, self-efficacy is an important barrier to action, where individuals often feel powerless in achieving large goals such as mitigating global climate change.
[11][12] This barrier is namely present in Western countries where individuals enjoy comparatively high levels of objective and subjective wellbeing due to socioeconomic status.
[13] It has been noted that to live within environmental limits, there is a need to make changes to the comfortable aspects of Western lifestyles, for example, reducing meat consumption, the use of airplanes, and use of electronic gadgets with short life-spans.
[16] A shift in values may be difficult, as people's life goals are formed by their ideas of social progress, personal status, and success through careers, higher incomes and consumption.
[13] Moreover, there exist deep structural and cultural roots that couple the macro-level of financial, property or labour institutions to the micro-level of individualistic, utilitarian values.
[4] Sunk cost barriers are the investments (not necessarily financial) of an individual that in turn restrict alternative possibilities for change, or in this circumstance, for pro-environmental behaviour.
In the United States for example, Americans have been polled every year about their confidence in their country's institutions (e.g. the Supreme Court, Congress, the Presidency, and the health-care establishment), and there has been a reported collapse in trust over time (12% in 2017).
Examples of policy changes include pulling out of the Paris Agreement, loosening regulations on toxic air pollution, and issuing an executive order that called for a 30% increase in logging on public lands.
[22] There is a 97% scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change,[23] yet there is still not enough being done to meet global temperature targets of staying below a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase (see Paris Agreement).
As much as stagnant wages in former manufacturing regions, glaring economic inequality, or white backlash after the Obama Presidency, the country's disillusionment with institutions enabled Donald Trump's election.Risk perception barriers include worrying about whether financial or temporal investments will pay off.
[4] There exists the concept of psychological distance, where people tend to discount future risks when making trade-offs between cost and benefits, and instead prioritize immediate day-to-day concerns.
[10][30][31] Research has shown that information has a greater impact on behaviour if it is tailored to the personal situations of consumers and resonates with their important values.
As nations become more prosperous, their citizens are less concerned with the economic battle for survival and are free to pursue postmaterialistic ideals such as political freedom, personal fulfillment, and environmental conservation.
[35] In other cases however, environment-friendly behaviours may be undertaken for non-environmental reasons, such as to save money or to improve health (e.g. biking or walking instead of driving).
[3] An example of a structural choice that can influence an individual's use of high carbon transport, occurs when cities governments allow sprawling neighbourhoods to develop without associated public transit infrastructure.
