Lessons from the Greendex survey

As it looks, we have never been as conscious of the need to change our behaviour for the sake of humanity and the planet. According to the National Geographic Survey Greendex 2014 a growing number of consumers feel concerned by their environmental impacts. Greendex has been surveying the behaviour and consciousness of consumers in 18 countries in developed and emerging economies since 2008. A majority of consumers (61%) are concerned by their impacts on the environment and these concerns have increased in 11 out of 18 surveyed countries since then. Overall between 40 and 60% of the consumers are translating this into some form of action to reduce their footprints. The study provides a lot of insights into these actions in the areas of food, mobility, housing and other goods.

You may compute your own score using the Greendex calculator.

Surprisingly top-scoring consumers live in the emerging economies of India, China, South Korea and Brazil in descending order. The top-ten countries are all from emerging economies, while the so-called “developed countries” all receive lower scores, with Canada and the USA being the rear-guard. This pattern is interpreted as a consequence of the tangible impacts of rapid industrialization on health and livelihoods in these countries.

Greendex also teaches us that consciousness and behaviour are correlated (as shown in the graph presenting the relation between Greendex score and guilt feeling). A greater number of consumers in emerging economies feel guiltier about their impacts on the environment than consumers of countries having a low score in the index. A paradoxical fact is that those taking action are also those who feel less empowered to act and change their behaviour.

The other important lesson is that behaviour change is slow and incremental. During the 8 first years of the survey, the behaviour of consumers has become environmentally friendlier in all countries except Brazil. Environmental concerns have also clearly increased in 11 of the surveyed countries.

Diving deeper into the results one can notice diverging evolutions. The food area is the one showing the most positive evolutions and is clearly driving the positive trend.  On the contrary the housing and other consumer goods areas tend to exhibit changes in the wrong direction.

Housing is assessed through changes in heating or air-conditioning practices, through energy saving devices or green energy purchases. It is the area where changing behaviour is the most difficult. The housing sub-index is clearly the lowest of the 4 sub-indices and has remained rather stable throughout the years. It is also where the spread between richer and poorer is most important. 

Transportation is an area that motivates comparatively more sustainable behaviour, through e.g. using public transport, living in the vicinity of their working place. Here a majority of the consumers is showing some action (55 to 70%), but change is slow and limited. An obvious difficulty here is that in emerging economies the consciousness of the issues is counterbalanced by the social status of car ownership. In developed economies, transport routines are also very difficult to change: they are highly systemic and depend on housing patterns, distance to working place and individual preferences. Public policies have an important role to play here.

Food reaches the highest activeness scores with 52 to 72% of consumers taking action through e.g. reduced frequency of beef consumption, bottled water purchase, or increased local food consumption. Similar to transportation, the evolution is driven by increased concern but also by increasing economic welfare in emerging economies.  All in all the food area is where the most positive trend is observed, especially in recent years.

As for Other Goods, the index is based on the propensity of consumers to repair or recycle rather than to replace, to buy reusable products or to pay a premium for environmental-friendly products.  The proportion of consumers is here a bit lower than for the two previous areas and has shown negative trends in 11 countries in recent years.

The perception of environmental friendliness is in general positive with “responsible” and “caring” being the most frequent attributes (see word cloud). There is also a striking disconnect between self-perception of greenness (in general fairly high) and perception of overall societal behaviour (much lower). 

So what do we learn from this survey? Are we changing our behaviour at the required speed? No. Even if we feel concerned by the quality of our environment, transformative action is slow. We stick to our habits because changing them is painful and requires energy as explained by Daniel Kahnemann and the behavioural economists. Our behaviour is greatly dictated by our “System 1” thinking i.e. our automatic and effortless decision-making process. We also tend to wait until the new behaviours become the social norm.  

Most of those who change are first movers, already engaged in a series of transitions: they tend to take the train, they sort out their garbage, they are cautious about their energy consumption, their food waste or travel behaviour. How to engage new people beyond these first movers in an accelerated way?

As System 2 suggest, both self-awareness and control need to be built. We will be diving deeper on how to go into such a personal level transformation and thus accelerate the pathway towards System 2 in the upcoming posts.