A paper generated by the Merz Institute, an Aotearoa New Zealand-based think tank, and published in the journal Science Progress in 2023, hypothesizes that the environmental crises our planet faces today are the direct result of “the Human Behavioural Crisis” — with ecological overshoot driven by economic growth, marketing and pronatalism (the social and institutional pressures to have children). Humanity’s maladaptive behavior, unless changed, the authors maintain, is so ingrained that it could result in the failure of major environmental solutions as proposed today, including “resource-intensive interventions” such as a global transition to renewable energy, which the paper concludes isn’t just a “narrow intervention” but “likely to make matters worse.” Lead author Joseph Merz, founder & chairman of the Merz Institute, and his co-authors propose that marketing, which they count as one of the three major drivers of ecological overshoot (when humanity’s demands exceed ecosystems’ regenerative capacity), should be harnessed as a key environmental solution. “Paradoxically, the marketing, media and entertainment industries complicit in the creation and exacerbation of the behavioural crisis, may just be our best chance at avoiding ecological catastrophe,” they write. “I don’t think we have much time at all … to make the necessary behaviorial changes [via] … understanding and education,” Merz explains on the Planet: Critical podcast. Merz instead urges using consumer psychology, data analytics and other persuasive tools employed by the marketing, advertising and communication industries, “to create the levels of change we need” quickly with the public. Among its recommendations, the paper offers…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post Ecological overshoot is a ‘behavioral crisis’ & marketing is a solution: Study appeared first on EnviroLink Network.