Achieving environmental sustainability seen as coming at a cost

International research has shown that most people believe achieving environmental sustainability could hamper improvements to quality of life. Dr Charlie Crimston from UQ's School of Psychology said the study indicated that convincing people about our realistic prospects of creating a more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable world may be a major challenge. "We set out to identify where people saw areas of compatibility and tension for achieving sustainability," Dr Crimston said. "The most common belief across all 12 countries was that achieving environmental sustainability was in conflict with social sustainability, but not with economic sustainability. "While a minority of people believed you can achieve all three, most were somewhat sceptical, believing that targeting environmental issues like climate change and pollution come at a cost to efforts to improve quality of life." The team, led by Dr Paul Bain at the University of Bath, included researchers from the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Russia, Argentina, France and Japan. The study surveyed more than 2,100 people from 12 developed and developing countries about the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on environmental, economic, and social sustainability. "These findings offer novel insights into how to best communicate and improve public engagement with sustainability policy and practices, and how people perceive potential trade-offs in the pursuit of these goals," Dr Crimston said.