Significance of financial security in environmental behaviour

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on adaptation is demonstrating that the most vulnerable people are already disproportionally affected by the climate breakdown (IPCC, 2022: 8-9). The ongoing climate and environmental breakdown, the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russian war in Ukraine in early 2022 are creating a convergence of crises with grave concerns about its future unfolding and impacts on vulnerable groups. Inability to afford environmentally friendly actions might leave certain groups of society in a vicious circle. Based on quantitative social survey data from 2020 and 2021 within the Latvian Council of Science funded project ‘Ready for change? Sustainable management of common natural resources’, this paper demonstrates correlations between the financial security of people and environmental behaviour in Latvia. Financial security is measured by status of debt obligations and the length of time people can provide for themselves in case of the loss of their current income sources. We conclude that the overall financial security has significantly reduced from 2020 to 2021, while at the same time environmentally oriented behaviours have remained stagnant or less widespread. As a result of cluster analysis, three groups of financial security are distinguished and further analysis demonstrates that high income alone is an insufficient motivator for diverse environmental behaviour. Affluent people tend to do the simplest steps more often, like trying to sort their waste for recycling, while many with lower incomes and in rural areas are capable of more actions, with the overall lower consumption levels. Only thinking and acting beyond the ‘business-as-usual’ narrative can enable transformative actions to change the structural processes that keep causing the side-effects of our development.