As we head into a new year, what a good time to be thinking about bringing sustainability projects to our workplaces, neighborhoods, local businesses, and local schools. Community-level initiatives bring substantive greenhouse gas reductions, affect many people, and ideally inspire them to support more climate action. Behavior is inevitably involved in some fashion or other, so our expertise as behavior analysts often comes in handy. These projects can be both relatively easy and relatively inexpensive, too… At this stage of the Great Transition to a sustainable world, many successful examples serve as readily replicable role models, so we don’t have to Reinvent the Wheel. That’s really important, given the urgency of greenhouse gas reduction.
Because not all of these successes have been published in academic journals, other locations have been developed to facilitate their dissemination. Networks that share successes are far too many to name, but include the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), Science-based Targets (for businesses, corporations, and financial institutions), Green Schools Alliance (K-12 education), Health Care Without Harm, the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, and many others. I will write a post on AASHE some time; that’s the one I know best. Meanwhile, you have links to all those websites.
For this post, I’d like to focus on a freely available website, Tools of Change, designed to share such community-level successes.
Developed at the end of the 20th century, Tools of Change has long featured detailed descriptions of successful community-level projects in both the environmental arena and in public health. Canadians Jay Kassirer and Doug McKenzie-Mohr developed the site and accompanying resources. They took a solidly evidence-based, interdisciplinary approach, and behavior analysis principles are included. Indeed, McKenzie-Mohr’s well-known book, Fostering Sustainable Behavior (just out in its 4th edition), cites some behavior-analytic literature. And Tools of Change has a Topic Resource on schedules of reinforcement, linking to an article Angela Sanguinetti and I wrote a couple years ago for a mainstream sustainability journal, Energy Research and Social Science. More generally, of course learning principles are there… How could they not be? They’re ubiquitous.
Tools of Change includes a detailed section on planning a community-level sustainability project, including all necessary steps: choosing a project, finding partners, financing, etc. And it has a variety of useful features, like the Topic Resources I referred to. But the key feature is the several hundred “case studies” – actually experiments and quasi-experiments as well as case studies. All are data-based and detailed. They cover local businesses, large businesses, schools, neighborhoods, large and small municipalities, and more. And they include transportation, energy efficiency, electrification, food waste, water conservation, sustainable landscaping, recycling, plant-based meals … the whole gamut. Ample information is provided to replicate. In Part 2, I will describe some examples that are particularly relevant for behavior analysts.