The 2020 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: responding to converging crises

For the Chinese, French, German, and Spanish translations of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section.

Compensatory and Catalyzing Beliefs: Their Relationship to Pro-environmental Behavior and Behavioral Spillover in Seven Countries

There is growing research interest in behavioral spillover and its potential for enabling more widespread lifestyle change than has typically been achieved through discrete behavioral interventions. There are some routes by which spillover could take place without conscious attention or explicit recognition of the connections between separate behaviors. However, in many cases there is an expectation that an individual will perceive behaviors to be conceptually related, specifically in terms of their compensatory (suppressing further action) or catalyzing (promoting further action) properties, as a prerequisite for both negative and positive spillover. Despite this, relatively little research has been carried out to assess the beliefs that may underpin spillover processes as held by individuals themselves, or to measure these directly. We develop and evaluate a survey-based instrument for this purpose, doing so in a sample of seven countries worldwide: Brazil, China, Denmark, India, Poland, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (approx. 1,000 respondents per country). This approach allows us to assess these measures and to compare findings between countries. As part of this, we consider the connections between beliefs about behavioral relationships, and other key variables such as pro-environmental identity and personal preferences. We observe higher levels of endorsement of compensatory beliefs than previous research, and even higher levels of endorsement of novel items assessing catalyzing beliefs. For the first time, we present evidence of the validity of such measures with respect to comparable constructs, and in relation to people's consistency across different types of behaviors. We reflect on the implications of considering the relationships between behaviors in the context of people's subjective beliefs and offer recommendations for developing this line of research in the broader context of spillover research and within a cross-cultural framework.

Waste Reduction Behaviors at Home, at Work, and on Holiday: What Influences Behavioral Consistency Across Contexts?

Demand for materials is increasing, along with the environmental damage associated with material extraction, processing transport and waste management. While many people state they recycle at home, adoption of sustainable waste practices in the workplace and other contexts (particularly, on holiday) is often lower. Understanding how to promote more sustainable behaviors (including, but also going beyond, recycling) across a range of contexts remains a key challenge for policy-makers and researchers. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) has been applied to a range of environmentally-friendly behaviors but the relative importance of the model's predictors has not yet been explored across a range of contexts. Here, we test the TPB across workplace (laboratory and office), home and holiday contexts, and examine whether consistency across contexts is a function of pro-environmental identity. Following ten semi-structured interviews, we undertook an online survey with laboratory workers (primarily in the UK; N = 213) to examine the predictors of recycling and waste reduction habits across these contexts. Interview findings indicate a range of motivations and barriers to recycling in the workplace, and inconsistency across home and work behaviors. Expanding the focus to include holiday as well as workplace and home contexts, our survey analysis shows that the proportion of waste recycled in the home is higher (67%) than in the workplace (39%) and on holiday (38%). Further, the TPB explained around twice as much variance in home recycling compared to work or holiday recycling; but overall did not provide a good explanation for recycling. The study highlights the importance of both contextual (e.g., facilities) and individual (e.g., identity) factors in shaping waste behaviors. We find significant correlations amongst different waste reduction behaviors within and between contexts, though within-context (e.g., home) behaviors are generally more strongly related. Future research should move beyond the TPB to expand the range of contextual (e.g., organizational) factors explored in contexts beyond the home, including workplace and holiday contexts. Given the different drivers-of and barriers-to waste reduction within and between contexts, a range of interventions will be required to promote recycling, reduction and reuse behaviors across these contexts.