Climate is changing behaviour – and business must react

Analysis: The Covid pandemic brought huge changes to how we live. Now the push for net zero will require the same and government must help consumers make the switch, writes Phil Thornton

A protester in Glasgow, the host city for Cop26 (PA)

Anyone who has tried to give up smoking, cut down on alcohol or take up more exercise will know how hard it is to embrace new habits that are painful in the short term but offer huge long-term benefits.

Negotiators at the Cop26 climate conference are starting to make a series of opaque commitments to cut emissions. Ultimately, it will fall to corporates to fulfil these promises, and households to pay the bill, whether through higher taxes, reduced choice, or one-off costs for a new car or boiler.

Luckily, there are some lessons on behaviour to be drawn from a recent episode when governmental reaction to a major crisis led to significant changes: the Covid-19 pandemic.

As governments move to ease those Covid restrictions – and some, such as the UK, faster than others – it raises the question of which of these new behaviours that many of us have adopted will stick.

According to social psychology research carried out a little over a decade ago, it takes an average of 66 days for a new behaviour to become automatic.

Given that the British population was under some form of restriction between late March 2020 and mid-July 2021, or almost 500 days, one hopes that some might have stuck.

Economists at Nomura bank have graded 15 behaviours that have changed since the pandemic on an index of zero to 10 of how likely they are to stay permanent.

Consumer behaviours with low scores are likely to be discontinued. These include social distancing, as well as online and home-based learning for schoolchildren.

At the other end of the spectrum, those with the highest scores are likely to become permanent or repeated on a regular basis. The most obvious examples are consumers shifting more to online shopping and accessing streaming services.

In the middle are hybrid changes such as working-from-home arrangements that are already becoming the norm but are only part-time for the majority. Obtaining medical advice online will become more popular but not wholly replace visits to the GP.

Businesses have had to adapt quickly to changes in consumer behaviour, especially the more permanent ones. The shift to online shopping is an obvious one, accelerating usage while reeling in new converts.

There is potential for firms to innovate to adapt to how people behave. The ones that will be most successful are those that can set out their values and adapt to changing customer demands as people spend more time at home and rely more on online channels.

Interestingly, the consultancy McKinsey & Co has managed to find five lessons for suppliers of toilet paper – or “bathroom tissue” as they called it – the shortage of which was, of course, a stand-out feature of the early days of lockdown.

This is the hope: that consumers’ experience of changing their behaviours, combined with a desire for greater sustainability, will lead firms to focus more on delivering lower-carbon products.

According to research for the British Fashion Council and Clearpay, almost two-thirds of survey respondents said making environmentally conscious fashion purchases was either “very important” or “fairly important”, while 62 per cent agreed that “long-term wearability is the most important factor when buying clothes”.

Consumers are certainly talking the talk. A survey for a report by Deutsche Bank on how the burden for taking climate action will shift to companies showed that a third of Britons were likely to change their diet to be predominantly plant-based in the next six to 12 months, while 30 per cent were likely to stop eating food transported from another country.

But the issue is whether people will walk the walk. According to the government’s advisory Climate Change Committee, societal and behavioural changes are required in 62 per cent of measures to limit carbon consumption.

However, humans being humans, we find it hard to focus on more than a few goals at the same time. Earlier this year, the Tony Blair Institute identified three key ones: making homes more efficient, using an electric car, and eating less meat and dairy.

In each, it found either that few people were changing their behaviour (meat) or felt they were doing as much as they could (homes), or that they were anxious about the cost and effectiveness of alternatives (cars).

The government’s net zero strategy makes much of “going with the grain of consumer behaviour”. Whatever happens in Glasgow, the next task must be to help us make those essential sacrifices. Cop26 may only last two weeks, but after almost 500 days of Covid, many will see that changing their habits is not as hard as they might have thought.