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You may not realize it, but a lot of your actions may affect the environment around you. For example: If you’re a farmer, activities such as taking care of livestock and using fertilizers can release certain gases like methane and carbon dioxide into the air. Or if you work in the waste disposal business, your job leads to the release of greenhouse gases as well through the use of landfills and the process of incinerating waste.
But if you really want to know what specific daily actions of yours are really impacting climate change, then you should give SHIFT a try! The SHIFT (Super High-Impact Initiative for Fixing Tomorrow) Project has created its own questionnaire that acts as a guide for you on what your most impactful climate actions are. This questionnaire is tailored to your specific circumstances and it’s based on scientific research, so it’ll be as accurate with the information as possible.
What is the SHIFT Guide?
Professor Kimberly Nicholas, who works at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies in Sweden, launched the SHIFT guide along with Project Drawdown. Drawdown is a nonprofit organization that focuses on science-based solutions for climate change, so they were the perfect company for Nicholas to work with. Nicholas stated that she had been working on identifying effective climate actions for the past 10 years and soon enough, SHIFT came about.
When creating SHIFT, Nicholas wanted to focus more on the big actions that truly make a difference when it comes to climate. She has used as much literature as she could find on the topic of climate change to rank actions in the order of effectiveness.
How Does the SHIFT Questionnaire Go?
The questionnaire starts off by asking you three questions about your income, politics, and education. Specifically they ask: whether your income is over $38,000, if you live in a liberal democracy, and if you have a college degree. Yes, these questions don’t seem to have anything to do with climate change, but there’s a reason they’re the first three to appear on the questionnaire.
It’s to help focus on the most effective “climate superpowers”, which is another term that refers to the actions people can take to fight climate change. Those superpowers can vary depending on your circumstances, such as if you’re living in a democracy, the questionnaire can focus on actions that most citizens of a democracy are capable of doing.
How Much Impact Can People Have as Citizens?
If you don’t think that your actions as a normal citizen really impact the environment, why not take a look at Seth Wynes study from the 2019 election in Canada? Wynes is an assistant professor and he also had a big interest in climate change mitigation. He has worked with Professor Nicholas as a co-author of The Climate Mitigation Gap as well.
Back to his 2019 study, Wynes discovered that one of the parties in the election was cutting back on effective climate policies. But voting for the Liberal party that year led to 34.2 tons of climate pollution being saved! So next time you vote, remember to research the candidates thoroughly beforehand and make sure they have preventive measures for climate change in mind.
Best Strategies for Preventing Climate Change as Professionals
The highest rated action you could take as a professional is to convince your workplace to join the Science Based Targets Initiative. Also, you should try to get your work investments out of fossil fuels (think about banks and insurance companies). Any job can be a climate job, so just be careful how you do your job and how you use your skills.
Actions You Can Take In an Investor Role
Investments can be dangerous if they’re for companies that fund things like fossil fuels. If banks hear that their customers don’t like their involvement in such investments, they’ll have to take the customers’ thoughts into consideration. So if you can influence the decisions of your local bank, try to get them to become a fossil free bank, okay?
Actions of the Consumer Role
When it comes to the role of a consumer, the SHIFT questionnaire highlights four specific actions. Those fours are: reducing flights, driving, meat consumption, and switching to renewables. These actions were the top picks when it came to researcher Diana Ivanova’s work, which is mostly from her meta-analysis from 2020.
Conclusion
Professor Nicholas really hopes that you gain some insight from taking the quiz. You could really make a difference in the world just by performing even the simplest of actions. With everyone doing their part to make the world a safer place to live in, climate change can be a thing of the past!