Negativity may not be the best way to encourage people to act in a more sustainable fashion

If the battle to protect the planet from the harmful impact of human activity requires shifts in individual behaviour, the question for policymakers, businesses and others is what tools can be used to change habits and what messages will prove most powerful.

What is becoming clear is that the fear factor is not effective in altering behaviour. Despite the success of Al Gore’s documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, which presented terrifying images of the effects of climate change, shock tactics have had a limited effect.

For many, messages such as Gore’s simply reinforce the view that climate change is a ruse to destroy western economies and diminish people’s quality of life. And even those who are not climate sceptics can only take so many predictions of doom before switching off.

Instead, those working to “nudge” consumers towards more responsible consumption choices might look at how the corporate sector has started to approach environmental sustainability – as an opportunity.

Companies from GE and Nike to Unilever and Marks and Spencer have used sustainability strategies as a means of promoting innovation, cutting costs and creating new sources of revenue.

It is an idea that scientist, innovator and energy guru Amory Lovins, head of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has applied to climate change. Climate change, Lovins said, is actually “a lucrative business opportunity disguised as an environmental problem.”

Lovins has argued, for example, that the US could wean itself off oil and coal by 2050 without requiring an act of Congress but through business-led investments, unlocking savings of $5 trillion.

So could a similar approach be harnessed in trying to change human habits and consumption patterns? Given the fact that consumers are often driven by price, the opportunity to save money is certainly one way to present more sustainable options.

This, for example, might mean demonstrating how much could be saved on energy bills by investing in better home insulation. It could involve showing families how to cut their household expenditure by improving meal planning, helping them reduce the amount of food they throw away.

Convenience is another incentive that can encourage more sustainable consumer behaviour. Witness the success of car sharing services and bike share schemes. These services ultimately take more cars off the road and encourage healthier lifestyles. For users, however, the attraction of these services is often the ability to access convenient, affordable alternative forms of transport.

A third approach that uses positive reinforcement, rather than scare tactics, to encourage sustainable behaviours revolves around the idea of an individual’s environmental “handprint”. In contrast to a carbon footprint, which represents the damage an individual has done to the environment, a handprint seeks to quantify the positive impact they make by changing their behaviour.

The idea was devised by Greg Norris, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. Dr Norris is currently developing an app, named ‘Handprinter’, which allows users to calculate their environmental handprint and to improve it by sharing environmentally ideas through their social networks.

These examples show that there are many positive ways to encourage customers and citizens to behave in more environmentally sustainable ways. However, they still require governments and businesses to commit to driving that change.

This raises the question: how can activists and concerned citizens use positive reinforcement to encourage them to do so?

Do you think the environmental movement is too negative to change people's behaviour? Share your thoughts on the Future Realities LinkedIn group, sponsored by Dassault Systèmes.