RESUMO
At the 2019 and 2021 International Conference on Environmental Psychology, discussions were held on the future of conferences in light of the enormous greenhouse gas emissions and inequities associated with conference travel. In this manuscript, we provide an early career researcher (ECR) perspective on this discussion. We argue that travel-intensive conference practices damage both the environment and our credibility as a discipline, conflict with the intrinsic values and motivations of our discipline, and are inequitable. As such, they must change. This change can be achieved by moving toward virtual and hybrid conferences, which can reduce researchers' carbon footprints and promote equity, if employed carefully and with informal exchange as a priority. By acting collectively and with the support of institutional change, we can adapt conference travel norms in our field. To investigate whether our arguments correspond to views in the wider community of ECRs within environmental psychology, we conducted a community case study. By leveraging our professional networks and directly contacting researchers in countries underrepresented in those networks, we recruited 117 ECRs in 32 countries for an online survey in February 2022. The surveyed ECRs supported a change in conference travel practices, including flying less, and perceived the number of researchers wanting to reduce their travel emissions to be growing. Thirteen percent of respondents had even considered leaving academia due to travel requirements. Concerning alternative conference formats, a mixed picture emerged. Overall, participants had slightly negative evaluations of virtual conferences, but expected them to improve within the next 5 years. However, ECRs with health issues, facing visa challenges, on low funding, living in remote areas, with caretaking obligations or facing travel restrictions due to COVID-19 expected a switch toward virtual or hybrid conferences to positively affect their groups. Participants were divided about their ability to build professional relationships in virtual settings, but believed that maintaining relationships virtually is possible. We conclude by arguing that the concerns of ECRs in environmental psychology about current and alternative conference practices must be taken seriously. We call on our community to work on collective solutions and less travel-intensive conference designs using participatory methods.
RESUMO
Social change can be pursued by participating in a public protest, joining a community gardening initiative, or recycling at home. However, little research has investigated how individual differences in values relate to people's engagement in different types of social change actions in the context of pro-environmental behavior. We hypothesized that values would be differentially related to different types of social change actions, based on different goals that each of these actions may have (e.g., changing one's own behavior or influencing others). A survey among people engaged in pro-environmental activism during the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference supported our predictions. Specifically, we found that individual behavior and community-based actions were uniquely related to biospheric values (i.e., a key concern for nature and the environment). However, other social change actions (e.g., public protest) were uniquely related to altruistic values (i.e., a key concern for the welfare of all people), and pro-environmental lobbying was positively related to egoistic values (i.e., a key concern for power and achievement). Our findings suggest that different behaviors directed at pro-environmental social change may be based on different values. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.