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Environmental Management Strategies
- Challenge: Despite the scientific consensus on the risks of climate change and threats to availability of resources, there has been little change in the economic behaviors that exacerbate those risks.
The most consequential example of the impact of persistent time behaviors is in the area of environmental change. Time-behaviors can be used to understand how individual behaviors, which may appear short-term, can have long-term global impact. The time-behavior approach captures two effects that amplify the impact of individual behaviors, namely, the cumulative impact of repeated events over time and the network effects of replicated behaviors across populations.
It then becomes interesting to ask: what are the circumstances under which behaviors change in individuals, and what are the circumstances under which behavioral changes propagate across populations? Like the behaviors that factor into chronic health conditions, behaviors that pose environmental risks are easier to name than change. Existing behaviors depend on an infrastructure that has evolved in concert with the behaviors themselves. Think of the codependence between the commuting behaviors and the multiple support systems involving land use, energy production and vehicle investment.
What are the incentives that can change the norms of energy use as dramatically as the recent changes in patterns of U.S. cigarette consumption? The time-behavior viewpoint enables a focus on the control points of change, the behaviors that cause the trends now recognized to pose unacceptable risks to global futures.
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