Introduction and Literature review
During the 25th United Nations Climate Change conference (2019), António Guterres (Secretary-General of UN) has again emphasized the absolute urgency of the climatic situation. Indeed, a recent report (2018) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underlined that it is absolutely crucial to maintain the global warming under 1.5°C by 2100. Hence, some huge changes must be realized in order to reduce our CO2 emissions! In that kind of global crisis, the science, and especially the environmental psychology can be very useful to accompany and support the evolution toward a more green and sustainable society. Indeed, the environmental psychology permits to subtly understand how an individual interacts with their environment, and thus can be really useful to understand the underlying psychological factors of the pro-environmental behaviors.
We chose to focus the master’s research on the sustainable food consumption. Among the scientific literature, a large amount a psychological predictor has been identified: attitude toward the environnement, self-efficacy, locus of control, habit, social and personal norms, values, belief, place identity, personality, etc. (check Gifford and Nilsson, 2014, to go further) Our work is specifically about the link between connectedness to nature (CN) and pro-environmental food consumption, since this scientific issue has not been largely explored. The connectedness to nature refers to the links an individual sustains with natural environment; emotionally, cognitively or even behaviorally. (Mayer and Frantz, 2004)
Hypotheses and methodology
Our first goal was to clarify the conceptual lien between connectedness to nature (CN) and green eating. Since numerous studies about other types of ecological behaviors showed that a high level of CN can predict a high level of pro-environmental behaviors (Navarro et al., 2019), our hypothesis was that these two variables would be positively linked. Additionally, our second hypothesis was that the two sub-concepts of the sustainable food consumption would not be linked with the same intensity to the CN.
With the project, we also wanted to make a methodological contribution to this research’s field by building and proposing a French measurement scale for the sustainable food consumption. Since no measurement tool of this concept actually exists in French language, it was the opportunity to conduct this project!
In this perspective, we firstly conducted a series of 6 interviews. Our purpose was to interrogate people about their vision and practices about food consumption. This data really helped us to deepen our understanding of the subject and gave us some clues for the scale. With this information and the English scales already available, we were able to build a bidimensional 12-items scale with good psychometrics qualities! As an extension of Verain’s study (2015), we identified two sub-aspects of the green eating: sustainable product choice (e.g eating local or organic) and consumption curtailment (e.g eating meat or not).
The questionnaire we used was composed of this scale, a scale measuring the connectedness to nature and some sociodemographic questions. The survey was conducted during March and July 2020, including 1058 participants.
Results and discussion
Our statistical analysis underlines some significant links between connectedness to nature and food consumption, using both Bravais-Pearson’s correlations and linear regressions. Thus, our first hypothesis (r=.411, p<.001) is validated. Our second was is also validated, the analysis highlighting that the CN is more linked to sustainable product choice (r=.390, p<.001) than to the consumption curtailment (r=.190, p<.001).
These results show that consumption curtailment is not explained very well by our variables. Therefore, it would be wise to conduct new studies in order to explore this issue further.
Bibliography:
GIEC. (2018). Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty. https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
Gifford, R., & Nilsson, A. (2014). Personal and social factors that influence pro-environmental concern and behaviour : A review: PERSONAL AND SOCIAL FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE PRO-ENVIRONMENTAL BEHAVIOUR. International Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12034
Mayer, F. S., & Frantz, C. M. (2004). The connectedness to nature scale : A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24(4), 503‑515. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2004.10.001
Navarro, O., Tapia-Fonllem, C., Fraijo-Sing, B., Roussiau, N., Ortiz-Valdez, A., Guillard, M., Wittenberg, I., & Fleury-Bahi, G. (2019). Connectedness to nature and its relationship with spirituality, wellbeing and sustainable behaviour. Psyecology, 1‑12. https://doi.org/10.1080/21711976.2019.1643662
Verain, M. C. D., Dagevos, H., & Antonides, G. (2015). Sustainable food consumption. Product choice or curtailment? Appetite, 91, 375‑384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2015.04.055