For example, people tend to think that the environmental burden of a car pool remains the same when hybrid cars are added to the pool, as if numbers do not matter as long as the cars are seemingly friendly to the environment Kim and Schuldt, The complexity of the problem is too large for people to understand the effect of their consumer choices, traveling behavior, recycling efforts, and lifestyles on climatic change.
Without access to more detailed information, such as life cycle analyses of the products in the grocery stores for instance, people apply the balancing heuristic to guide intuitive judgments and decision-making toward what they think is an overall averaged environmentally friendly behavior.
People who experience guilt, from environmentally questionable behavior, will seek what they think are sustainable behaviors as an instrument for restoring moral balance.
Sachdeva et al. However, although buying a bundle of eco-labeled bananas is better for the environment than buying the same amount of conventionally grown bananas, it is worse than not buying any bananas at all. One way to help people make more sustainable decisions on the individual level would be to give consumers feedback on the carbon footprint of the wares they are about to purchase, for example by taking advantage of self-scanning systems, where customers scan their products themselves before paying for them.
In addition to the accumulated price with each product, the system could also provide the customers with an accumulated carbon footprint estimate of their wares. Giving direct and concrete feedback about the effect of consumer choices can work in an informational way as well as in a way that nudges people to make better choices Linder et al. Simple aspects of the design of public places, like a paper towel dispenser that shows a green map of Africa, which slowly fades away for each towel dispended, can affect the choice architecture and thus promote environmentally friendly behavior.
To overcome the balancing heuristic as a cognitive barrier to sustainability, we need to make people deal with the source of the problem instead of seeking ways to compensate for it, in part through education and information campaigns.
The cognitive barriers are sometimes hard to break down, however, because people are not prepared to spare what is needed to deal with the source of the problem. Population growth is one of the major driving forces of future climatic change and legislations to prevent population growth would mitigate climatic changes, but such legislations are likely to be met with both ethical, political, and religious arguments cf.
This tendency makes it important to inform the public about the climate changes in the right way — to stress the severity of the problem enough to make people understand the problem, but not so much that it makes people reject the information. The behavioral patterns that follow from the balancing heuristic influence decisions not only on the individual level but also on macro levels. Nations may justify weaponry exports to dictatorships by also enacting climate-change alleviation interventions in the third world.
The present jurisdiction governing these devices do not fully consider their psychological consequences. Also, things that are gentle for the closest environment like organically produced meat are not necessary gentle on the climate, which calls for more precise climate related labeling of products. Steiner et al. The proposed framework in this paper suggests that several examples of unsustainable behavior and effects negative footprint illusions, rebound effects, compensatory green beliefs, quantity insensitivity, etc.
The strategies proposed can hopefully help toward reducing the negative effects of this inherited cognitive handicap. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
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As a hydrological result it is found that:. Lal and Stewart estimated global loss of agricultural land by degradation and abandonment at 12 million hectares per year. Human-induced land degradation tends to be particularly serious in dry regions. The environmental impact of energy harvesting and consumption is diverse. In the real world, consumption of fossil fuel resources leads to global warming and climate change.
However, little change is being made in many parts of the world. In recent years there has been a trend towards the increased commercialization of various renewable energy sources. Rapidly advancing technologies can achieve a transition of energy generation, water and waste management, and food production towards better environmental and energy usage practices using methods of systems ecology and industrial ecology.
Introductions of species, particularly plants into new areas, by whatever means and for whatever reasons have brought about major and permanent changes to the environment over large areas. Examples include the introduction of Caulerpa taxifolia into the Mediterranean, the introduction of oat species into the California grasslands, and the introduction of privet, kudzu, and purple loosestrife to North America.
Rats, cats, and goats have radically altered biodiversity in many islands. Additionally, introductions have resulted in genetic changes to native fauna where interbreeding has taken place, as with buffalo with domestic cattle, and wolves with domestic dogs. This creates air pollution, including nitrous oxides and particulates, and is a significant contributor to global warming through emission of carbon dioxide, for which transport is the fastest-growing emission sector.
By subsector, road transport is the largest contributor to global warming. Figure 3. Environmental regulations in developed countries have reduced the individual vehicles emission; however, this has been offset by an increase in the number of vehicles, and more use of each vehicle.
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