Climate Change: What Can One Person Do?
What can the average person do to impact climate change? Looking to world leaders and news media for answers has left many (us included) confused. When it comes to climate change, schools are teaching one thing, governments are recommending other things, and on social media you find—well—what you always find. It’s tempting to give up altogether—it’s such a gigantic problem, and world leaders can’t even get their act together—why should we even try?
Ball of Confusion
In the weeks following The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop26), environmental groups and activists have weighed in—and seem to universally regard it as a failure. While the world’s major powers pledged new reductions in carbon emissions, they are nowhere near enough to keep global warming to within the goal of 1.5°C higher than post-industrial levels, according to a post-conference report in The Guardian. It can feel like we are all waiting around in vain for someone in power to do the right thing—and it’s just not happening. There is so much complicated and conflicting information regarding climate change, it can feel very hard to know what an individual can do to help—if anything. There is also the nagging fear that large corporations are really the ones that have all the power in this situation, and are perhaps deftly deflecting responsibility for this mess back on the average person. Perhaps a lot of average people, acting together, can make a difference—but what are the most impactful things individuals can do?
Things the average person can do
When in doubt, turn to science! It turns out some very smart people have figured out what exactly we can do to make the biggest impact, and the findings conflict quite a bit with what is taught in schools or appears on the evening news programs throughout the world. In their paper “The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions,” (link at end of article) Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas list the top four things individuals can do to affect climate change:
The Big Four
Have one fewer child
Live car-free
Avoid airplane travel
Eat a plant-based diet
These actions were found to have a much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or exchanging household light bulbs for more energy-efficient ones (eight times less effective than a plant-based diet). Another common suggestion, switching from plastic bags to reusable shopping bags, is less than 1% as effective as a year without eating meat.
By the way, this study is not a vegan or plant-based community initiative—these are just the findings of the researchers—who constructed a list of 148 climate actions individuals could take, based on a literature review of 88 studies, government documents from countries with the largest carbon footprint, and school textbooks. They then ranked the actions based on which are the most impactful on climate change. The ranking is purely fact-based and doesn’t delve into ethical concerns surrounding, for instance “having one fewer child,” or the demographic problems such a strategy may incur in certain parts of the world.
Empowered to do your part
So if you’ve been sitting on the sidelines, wondering what you can do—now you know. Focusing on these “Big Four” actions, and teaching them to the next generation, can do a lot to help while governments and large corporations are, unfortunately, much too slow to act.
Until next time
Scott and Lennart
Link to study:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf