If fear won’t work, how can we encourage climate action?

The answers to this newspaper's recent poll of public reaction to possible climate measures were scarcely surprising. Along with concern at climate change went refusal of the tougher ways of doing something about it.

Few Irish people, it seems, would personally support carbon taxes on fuel and energy, or making it more expensive to buy petrol and diesel cars, or running the risk of electricity blackouts. Most opposed reduction of the national herd to check methane belches, or putting higher property taxes on homes that are not energy efficient.

While people generally agree that “something must be done by everybody” to arrest climate change, being hit in the pocket is unacceptable.

A lot, however, can depend on the total package. Friends of the Earth objected to a set of questions that neglected “positive” plans for change, such as solar panels on schools and retrofitting of homes, better public transport and cycle paths – all improvements to the quality of life.

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Winning public support for unpopular climate measures is now "a wicked problem" for social and behavioural scientists. Among them is Dr Brenda McNally. As a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, she led a study for the Environmental Protection Agency of Citizens' Views of Climate Action in Ireland (Research 344).

Dr McNally held discussions with groups from 10 diverse communities, among them a mother and baby group, community gardeners, youth advocates, community conservationists, trade unions and local officials. She quizzed their use of media and sources of public trust.

All talked of the impact of the BBC’s Blue Planet TV series presented by Sir David Attenborough. And for trustworthy information, most responded to scientists and “unbiased” environmental organisations and gave least trust to politicians, economists and other “vested interests”. They all wanted to to learn more, but many had little understanding of the technology of “social decarbonisation”.

Facts may be necessary, but knowing them does not always change behaviour. Dr McNally found “a specific Irish inflection to citizens’ emotional and experiential connection to climate action”. It produces a “high level of negative sentiment” and the potential for wider frustration and helplessness as to whether anything will work.

In the wake of the Covid-19 trauma, she added finally, “citizens may not want to engage with climate change . . . and people have a right to a period of recovery”.

Using fear to drive the need for social change, and dramatising news with images of fire and flood is not, after all, that persuasive. A UK study from the University of East Anglia is headed “Fear won’t do it”. Repeated exposure to fearful messages can have unintended consequences, it suggests, even, inviting “British comic nihilism” or “bugger it and open another bottle”.

This may not sound much like Ireland, so far, but the need for urgent images that relate to local and everyday life applies to both islands. Billowing industrial smokestacks or floods in Bangladesh, the study suggested, don’t promote much active personal engagement with decarbonisation.

Personal experiences of climate calamity no doubt concentrate minds. California’s wildfires and Germany’s floods have boosted regional support for climate measures, if often divided on political lines.

For this country, a surging flood in Dublin’s Liffey meeting a record storm surge in the bay would be one fearful scenario, dramatised by maps that showed how far the flood would reach into the city. But average human ability for imagining the future is put at about 15 to 20 years, which may just leave room for a shrug of postponement.

If fear doesn’t work, what about the promise of a happier and healthier post-carbon future?

There are few studies of individual reasons for adopting lower-carbon lifestyles. One from the University of Edinburgh is headlined “It’s not just ‘the environment, stupid’”. Most of its self-identified sample were found to be acting from personal feelings about social justice and the impact of climate change on poorer and helpless people, rather than worries about nature or the planet. A useful strategy for promoting low-carbon lifestyles, it suggested, could promote the value of frugality and ban materialist advertising.

Ireland can boast a few examples of low-carbon living, such as the eco-village model that has brought more than 50 households to Cloughjordan, Co Tipperary. But a taste for more frugal and self-sufficient living has been slow to catch on.

Among Dr McNally’s participants in her EPA study, visions of a post-carbon society were generally framed by a sustainable environment. Some – mainly “male experts”, she said – expected “an apocalyptic outcome” due to the current lack of action. But most simply hoped for a post-carbon society that was “green, clean, quiet and normal”.

Next Saturdays COP26 climate gathering in Glasgow should help tell more of where realism lies.