Navigating cognition biases in the search of sustainability

"My place in the grand scheme of things": perspective from nature and sustainability science

A burgeoning and diverse field of study investigates the many aspects of human-nature relationships-what they mean for ecosystems, for human well-being, and for transformations toward sustainability. We explore an emerging concept in human-nature relationship research: perspective from nature, defined as the idea that nature helps people gain perspective on where they fit in the world and what is important (what some people call a "reality check"); in most cases, this involves a shift of attention beyond themselves and their particulars. We analyze responses to open-ended questions in a survey (n = 3204) focused on how residents of Vermont, USA, experienced nature during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify 481 instances and six aspects of perspective from nature; ouranalysis deepens existing understandings of the concept. We connect perspective from nature to five emerging areas of study in global change research: the multiple values of nature, nature's mental health benefits, mindfulness, humility, and empathy. Perspective, this work suggests, is a construct that crosses multiple fields of study within human-nature relationships and offers potentially important insight into the role experience with nature may play in transitions toward sustainability.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-023-01339-8.

Transformative systemic changes to embed environmental sustainability in foodservices: A grounded theory exploration

AIMS

Foodservices are a strong contributor to global environmental impact. Systemic change is required to lead the transformation towards environmentally sustainable foodservices. However, guidance to support foodservices to be more environmentally sustainable is lacking. The aim was to explore food-related environmentally sustainable strategies and their transferability to foodservices in a range of settings, to inform a framework for future application and research.

METHODS

A constructivist grounded theory study design was used. Semi-structured interviews with foodservice sustainability consultants, who support foodservice organisations to improve environmental sustainability, were conducted. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded line-by-line. Ten consultants were purposively sampled for diversity in location, organisation type, funding model, and services provided. Codes were collapsed into categories, to inform the development of themes and a framework for the implementation of strategies.

RESULTS

Four sub-themes were created under an overarching theme of 'Transforming the Foodservice System': embedding leadership, shifting perspective, constructing collaborative networks, and fostering momentum. A range of implementation strategies were captured within the sub-themes.

CONCLUSION

These themes informed the development of a practical application framework for implementing sustainable strategies in foodservices that is useful for practice and future research in the area.

Cognitive bias and how to improve sustainable decision making

The rapid advances of science and technology have provided a large part of the world with all conceivable needs and comfort. However, this welfare comes with serious threats to the planet and many of its inhabitants. An enormous amount of scientific evidence points at global warming, mass destruction of bio-diversity, scarce resources, health risks, and pollution all over the world. These facts are generally acknowledged nowadays, not only by scientists, but also by the majority of politicians and citizens. Nevertheless, this understanding has caused insufficient changes in our decision making and behavior to preserve our natural resources and to prevent upcoming (natural) disasters. In the present study, we try to explain how systematic tendencies or distortions in human judgment and decision-making, known as “cognitive biases,” contribute to this situation. A large body of literature shows how cognitive biases affect the outcome of our deliberations. In natural and primordial situations, they may lead to quick, practical, and satisfying decisions, but these decisions may be poor and risky in a broad range of modern, complex, and long-term challenges, like climate change or pandemic prevention. We first briefly present the social-psychological characteristics that are inherent to (or typical for) most sustainability issues. These are: experiential vagueness, long-term effects, complexity and uncertainty, threat of the status quo, threat of social status, personal vs. community interest, and group pressure. For each of these characteristics, we describe how this relates to cognitive biases, from a neuro-evolutionary point of view, and how these evolved biases may affect sustainable choices or behaviors of people. Finally, based on this knowledge, we describe influence techniques (interventions, nudges, incentives) to mitigate or capitalize on these biases in order to foster more sustainable choices and behaviors.

Hospitality Industry 4.0 and Climate Change

This paper investigates under which conditions implementation of Industry 4.0 in the hospitality sector could help to combat climate change. The paper takes the form of a systematic literature review to examine the main pillars of Industry 4.0 in the hospitality industry and discuss how these technologies could help combat climate change. We propose five conditions under which Industry 4.0 could help to combat climate change. First, in the hospitality industry, increased use of Industry 4.0 technologies induces an increase in energy efficiency and a reduction of GHG. Second, increased use of Industry 4.0 technologies induces a reduction in water consumption and an increase in water use efficiency. Third, increased use of Industry 4.0 technologies induces a reduction in food waste. Fourth, increased use of Industry 4.0 technologies can promote Circular Hospitality 4.0. Fifth, increased use of Industry 4.0 technologies helps to reduce transport and travel. Hospitality Industry 4.0 technologies offer new opportunities for enhancing sustainable development and reducing GHG emissions through the use of environmentally friendly approaches to achieve the Paris Agreement objectives.

The effectiveness and efficiency of using normative messages to reduce waste: A real world experiment

Although they are only home to 16% of the global human population, high-income countries produce approximately one third of the world's waste, the majority of which goes to landfills. To reduce pressure on landfills and natural systems, environmental messaging should focus on reducing consumption. Messages that signal social norms have the potential to influence people to reduce their consumption of comfort goods, such as straws, which are not a necessity for most people. We conducted a randomized field-experiment at a marine park in Portugal to test whether different normative messages reduced visitors' paper straw use when compared to non-normative messages. We found that a message framed around a positive injunctive norm significantly reduced straw use compared to a non-normative message. We estimated that using the message at 17 park concession stands could keep over 27500 straws out of landfills annually and save the park money after two years.

The Concept of Resilience in Recent Sustainability Research

The concept of resilience gained increased attention in sustainability science, with a notable spike from 2014 onwards. However, resilience is a multifaceted concept with no unanimous definition, making applications in the context of sustainability, a similarly multifarious term, a challenge. Here, we examine the use of resilience in well-cited sustainability literature in the period from 2014 to 2018. Based on our analysis, resilience as a concept proves its analytical strength through a diverse set of frameworks, indicators, and models, while its usefulness as boundary object is less clear. Most of the examined publications do not cite one of the well-established resilience definitions as a conceptual basis. The normativity of resilience is often implicit and rarely critically questioned, and strong participatory approaches are lacking. A multivariate statistical full-text bibliographic analysis of 112 publications reveals four distinct research clusters with partial conceptual proximity but hardly any overlap. While the majority of publications consider human well-being as an integral factor in their research, some research marginalizes this concept. Resilience to climate change dominates the discourse in the literature investigated, which signifies a need to broaden research efforts to other equally pressing—but in terms of the concept, widely neglected—sustainability challenges.

Global and regional probabilities of major nuclear reactor accidents

The continued and extended use of nuclear power is often considered and discussed as a viable energy policy option to meet energy demands while also meeting national CO₂ emission reduction goals. A central issue in energy policy for sustainability is the question of nuclear reactor safety. However, studies on nuclear reactor safety often run up against the problem of estimating the probability of a major accident from patchy and limited empirical data. Here, we describe a simple probabilistic model of catastrophic nuclear reactor accidents based on a set of four assumptions. The model treats the accident probability in each of n reactors as a variable and returns the probability of a major accident in the reactor fleet. We find that, at 99.5% reactor safety, the probability of another Chernobyl- or Fukushima-sized event is 49% for the global fleet, and that safety would have to be 99.96% in order to bring that probability below 5%. We discuss our findings in light of the debate on energy policy for sustainability.

The coronavirus pandemic as an analogy for future sustainability challenges

The current coronavirus outbreak may provide an illustrative analogy for sustainability challenges, exemplifying how challenges such as climate change may become wicked problems demanding novel and drastic solution attempts.

Integrating Insights from Social-Ecological Interactions into Sustainable Land Use Change Scenarios for Small Islands in the Western Indian Ocean

Small islands are vulnerable to the synergistic effects of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances due to the fact of their small area, geographical isolation, responsive ecologies, rapidly growing and developing populations and exposure to sea level and climate change. These changes exert pressures on ecosystem services, such as the provisioning of resources, and therefore threaten the sustainability of livelihoods. We reviewed key sustainability and livelihoods literature to bring together concepts of environmental livelihood resilience and stability across temporal and spatial scales and integrated them to produce a new conceptual framework for dynamic environmental livelihood sustainability (DESL). This framework aims to facilitate the incorporation of local community perspectives into water, energy and food nexus thinking about sustainable land use to support local livelihoods. Finally, we provide insights from this case study to evaluate the effectiveness of the DESL framework in addressing gaps in existing frameworks. We suggest this framing provides a mechanism for enhancing the agency of communities to produce more cohesive and inclusive land use management plans that can lead to enhanced environmental sustainability pathways.

Why People Harm the Environment Although They Try to Treat It Well: An Evolutionary-Cognitive Perspective on Climate Compensation

Anthropogenic climate changes stress the importance of understanding why people harm the environment despite their attempts to behave in climate friendly ways. This paper argues that one reason behind why people do this is that people apply heuristics, originally shaped to handle social exchange, on the issues of environmental impact. Reciprocity and balance in social relations have been fundamental to social cooperation, and thus to survival, and therefore the human brain has become specialized by natural selection to compute and seek this balance. When the same reasoning is applied to environment-related behaviors, people tend to think in terms of a balance between “environmentally friendly” and “harmful” behaviors, and to morally account for the average of these components rather than the sum. This balancing heuristic leads to compensatory green beliefs and negative footprint illusions—the misconceptions that “green” choices can compensate for unsustainable ones. “Eco-guilt” from imbalance in the moral environmental account may promote pro-environmental acts, but also acts that are seemingly pro-environmental but in reality more harmful than doing nothing at all. Strategies for handling problems caused by this cognitive insufficiency are discussed.