Describe Some of the Factors That Prevent People from Engaging in Pro-Environmental Behaviour.

Introduction

It has often been noted that levels of knowledge and awareness about environmental issues have increased conspicuously over the last two decades. However, despite human acknowledging environmental problems as serious and supporting environmental protection, pro-environmental attitudes do not consistently translate into pro-environmental behaviours ( Oskamp et al.,1991). Pro-environmental behaviour aimed to minimize the negative impact on the nature by individual's day to day activities, including a variety of actions such as energy conservation, recycling and eco-conscious consumption.

Whereas, Blake (1999) pointed out most pro-environmental behaviour models are limited because they fail to take into account individual, social, and institutional constraints and assume that humans are rational and make systematic use of the information available to them. The following essay will then look to describe the factors that prevent people from engaging in pro-environmental behaviour, including both internal barriers and external barriers to action.

Internal factors

When talking about internal and personal barriers to sustainability, psychosocial element should be certainly taken into account which stem from our beliefs, attitudes, values and inhibitions as individuals. These are the barriers that show up in our private thoughts and social interactions, in which prevent people from participating in pro-environmental behaviour and this can be explained in several aspect. First of all, our environmental problems are generally as a result of the fact that human place more emphasis on today's tidy pleasures than tomorrow's greater needs and more likely to ignore large-scale environmental problems such as global climate change; in other words, we discount the future. For example, although the long-term rate would be huge, householders usually fail to insulate their home appropriately or to purchase energy-efficient appliance such as fluorescent light, the reason is they tend to focus on or overweight short-term considerations (Loewenstein and Thaler, 1989). In this case, an investigation of public perception of barrier to pro-environmental behaviour in UK has been made by Lorenzoni in 2007. According to participants' answer, a remarkable point was the idea of climate change being such a distant possibility with no immediate consequences. Most participants largely felt that there was little thing they can do about the climate since even if it did result in contrary environmental change, it has no impact on people at that time and likely wouldn't affect them in their lifetime. To put it simple, there is no immediate reward or immediate justification for people to engage in pro-environmental behaviour, and the potential benefit are often distance and not necessarily of personal value.

We humans' positive illusion