Attempts such as the U.S. ‘Green New Deal’ to create a more environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable world face a major challenge – people are sceptical you can achieve all three.
Attempts such as the U.S. ‘Green New Deal’ to create a more environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable world face a major challenge – people are sceptical you can achieve all three. And they believe that targeting environmental outcomes like climate change and pollution comes at a cost to efforts to improve their quality of life.
The study, led by Dr Paul Bain in collaboration with his colleague Dr Tim Kurz of Bath's Department of Psychology and international collaborators, aimed to identify where people saw areas of compatibility and tension for achieving sustainability. To do this, over 2100 people from 12 developed and developing countries were asked what the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed to achieve – environmental, economic, and/or social sustainability.
The findings, published today (Monday 2 September 2019) in Nature Sustainability, showed that people understood sustainability in four distinct ways. However, the dominant view, common across all countries, showed that most people saw environmental sustainability in tension with social sustainability, but not with economic sustainability.
Read more at University of Bath
