3 Individual actions
What difference can individual actions make to addressing the climate emergency? One argument often used by individuals to avoid making the effort of individual actions is that they are a ‘drop in the ocean’ and achieve little compared to larger-scale industrial change or government-mandated national and international measures. They are right when everyone’s actions are considered separately. But individual actions add together to make a real difference – much like a single vote achieves little, but all those single votes added together can change the world. Educators can support their learners in effective individual actions.
Wynes and Nicholas (2017) describe four individual actions that can have the biggest impact on greenhouse gas emissions:
- having one fewer child – an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year
- living car-free – 2.4 tCO2e saved per year
- avoiding airplane travel – 1.6 tCO2e saved per round-trip transatlantic flight
- eating a plant-based diet – 0.8 tCO2e saved per year.
Wynes and Nicholas (2017) also noted that in Canadian high school textbooks at that time, these actions were barely mentioned, together comprising just 4% of discussions about individual actions on climate change. They reported similar findings for school texts in the European Union (EU), US and Australia.
Beyond the direct impact of an action itself, there is another, perhaps less obvious, benefit to making individual changes. This is the effect on other people’s behaviour from observing your individual actions. In a survey of people with average or greater-than-average carbon footprints from flying, Westlake (2019) found that half of respondents who knew someone who had given up flying for climate-related reasons flew less themselves because of this example, with a further quarter saying it had changed their attitude to flying. If the exemplar person was famous, these proportions increased to three quarters reducing their flying-related carbon footprint, with just 7% saying there was no impact on them at all.
In addition to demonstrating ‘best practice’, the words of those advocating for bigger-scale actions, such as those taken by national governments, seem to carry more weight if the individuals calling for action demonstrate appropriate individual actions in their personal lives. Attari, Krantz and Weber (2019) found that government policies on reducing CO2 emissions were more likely to be supported by the public if the individual advocating for them had a low personal carbon footprint. They go on to say that advocators with a large carbon footprint can also win popular support for such initiatives if they reform their behaviour to reduce their carbon footprint.
It is important to note, however, that while individual actions do have value and do help, they are not enough on their own. Broader actions are a vital part of the picture. You will explore some of these, such as teaching about climate justice, and political action in the other parts of this course. Gandolfi (2022) encapsulates the issue perfectly when she explains the dawning realisation that she had been focused, even in her own teaching, on individual actions, and had not considered the ‘unequal footing of our private actions and public spheres’.