The prospects of transition to sustainability from the perspective of environmental values and behaviors in the EU 27 and globally

摘要

The goal of this paper is to identify the present potential for transition to sustainability in industrialized economies by analyzing environmental values and behaviors obtained from public opinion studies. Semiotics is used in the reconstruction of values from attitudinal data obtained in the European Union (EU) 27 and the US. The relationship between environmental values, attitudes, and behaviors is theoretically framed with the aid of specification hierarchy theory (Salthe SN. 1993. Development and evolution: complexity and change in biology. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press). The results, represented in the Environmental Values and Behavior Matrix, suggest that on average people did not start yet to question seriously about their consumption habits and lifestyles in the context of sustainability. The diffusion of environmental values in observed populations of EU 27 and in the US is relatively low and, consequently, people's actions in preserving the environment are mostly low-effort and low-scale. This result is congruent with other empirical data obtained globally. The main findings indicate that the extant state of distribution of environmental values and behaviors in the EU, US, and, indeed, globally shows a weak potential for transition to sustainability or to any kind of ‘green economy’.