On individual's perceptions and motivations for Climate Change mitigation: towards Citizen-led sustainability

Climate change mitigation and adaptation, among various other conceptualisations and strategies to tackle the complex crisis, can be seen as predominantly centralised (Lange et al., 2013). Various governmental or local municipality campaigns related to the application of SDGs, or corporations offering products and services under the banner of green business, are meant to assist the individual in actualising sustainability. However, such acts define the individual mainly as a consumer (Salovaara & Hagolani-Albov, 2024). Regardless of whether these entail the most effective ways for individuals to take part in mitigating climate change, a deeper dialogue is sorely needed between, for example, scientific and societal agendas on climate change and sustainability and citizens' understanding, sense of relevance, and motivation to take action on these issues. Both approaches are needed to bridge the possible differences and potential contradictions; citizen-led sustainability needs to be incorporated into the existing strategies, and the concurrent schemes need to be contextualised to the citizen in a much more relevant manner. 

To collaboratively bridge these intersectoral perspectives, our project in its initial stage collects the citizen perceptions through a survey. The citizen barometer survey is a University of Helsinki organised annual national survey, under which a 10-point questionnaire with 9 Likert-scale and one open-ended question was utilised to gather a general sentiment (e.g., Pozzi et al., 2016) on the concurrent climate change and sustainability attitudes, perceptions, strategies and schemes—and importantly: what they might have missed or overlooked from a citizen perspective. While the relevance of our research speaks to a vast academic audience, the broader impact it aims for comes from a planned intersectoral collaboration, where the collected data will be further contextualised. The workshops will engage various actors and actor-groups, to seek out for example, how could the concurrent mitigation schemes be better enacted in citizen-local governance collaboration; and what could be the implications of citizen-led sustainability in various educational contexts; or could the perceptions lead to new research agendas in atmospheric and geosciences? Simultaneously, the project promotes and actualises an approach to sustainability—or sustainabilities (Kothari et al., 2019) that aims to further democratise sustainability. We see such an approach as especially important in these times of potential polarisation—to which we see pluralisation to be the correct response. 

 

Keywords: climate change mitigation, sustainability, democratisation, citizen 

 

References:

Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaria, F., & Acosta, A. (2019). Pluriverse : a post-development dictionary. New Delhi: Tulika.

Lange, P., Driessen, P. P. J., Sauer, A., Bornemann, B., & Burger, P. (2013). Governing Towards Sustainability—Conceptualizing Modes of Governance. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 15(3), 403–425.

Pozzi, F. A., Fersini, E., Messina, E., & Liu, B. (2016). Sentiment analysis in social networks. Morgan Kaufmann.

Salovaara, J. J., & Hagolani-Albov, S. E. (2024). Sustainability agency in unsustainable structures: rhetoric of a capable transformative individual. Discover Sustainability, 5(1), 138.