How can I as just one person make a difference to the climate crisis?

Do you ever wonder what difference you as one person can make to the climate crisis ... when it just seems so incredibly massive?⁠ If so, you’re not alone. The scale of the challenge can feel daunting and demotivating. Our founder, Lucy Johnson, a psychotherapist explains two theories - “the ripple effect” and “tipping points” - that magnify our choices far beyond us - and may just have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis.

You might be happily recycling your yogurt pots only to find that only around 10% actually make it through the recycling process. And then think to yourself, but it’s just one yogurt pot on a planet that would take 4 months to drive around. What difference does it make where I throw the thing?

While adapting our lives to dealing with the changing climate - and the mountains of plastic waste we produce - can often end up being a surprising upgrade on what we were doing before, it can also leave us feeling confused - and sometimes overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge.

Even if you never recycled another yogurt pot, millions of people up and down the country are chucking them in the recycling bin every day believing they’re going to be recycled - or just chucking them in the bin. And where else are you going to put your yogurt pot?

Anyway, what’s the point of any of this?

Why bother?

Kim Kardashian sold out of her SKIMS shapewear in under a minute when she modelled it

It turns out the answer lies in what psychologists call the ripple effect.

The ripple effect is, of course, the beating heart of the fashion industry. It’s why Djerf Avenue sells out of the Forever blazer hours after top-trending influencer Matilda Djerf, herself, has been snapped wearing one. And why sailor suits flew off the shelves after Prince Louis wore one at the Platinum Jubilee.

In essence, it’s our very human trait of checking out what others are up to and then deciding we’d like a piece of that too.

So what does this have to do with binning yogurt pots?

It means that our personal behaviour can create a kind of social contagion. Seven years ago, two professors at Yale University studied households in Conneticut that had mounted solar panels on their rooves. The results were fascinating. The authors mapped out the households around the first home to adopt them and found concentric rings of solar panels on the houses around them.

They found that for each home that stuck a solar panel on the roof, their neighbours were nearly 50% more likely to install a solar panel themselves. ⁠

You might not be installing solar panels, but research shows that simply switching to a brand like SMOL, a planet-friendly dishwasher brand, inspires some people within your friends and family network to try it too, which, in turn, inspires their networks and so on. Like a pebble thrown in a pond, the ripples radiate outwards affecting more and more people.

Tipping points steal up on us and then they can become unstoppable

You may be wondering why if this is the case, everybody is not slinging solar panels on their roof - or using SMOL dishwasher tablets.

This is when we get to the theory of tipping points. And to understand this we enter the strange terrain of epidemiology - or the study of viruses.

Two decades before we’d even heard of COVID, Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, traced how a flu virus - which infects 1 in 50 people it encounters - can go from a constant rate of infecting New Yorkers over an icy cold NYC winter to a full-blown epidemic thanks to a burst of social mixing over the Christmas season. We now know all too well what that looks like.

It’s this switch from bubbling away to going viral that is what’s known as a tipping point.

According to Gladwell, when the process hits 20% of people that's "the magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire".⁠

When a tipping point has tipped, change can hit with astounding speed. That’s true particularly when there are incentives attached to the new social behaviour.

Take Norway’s EV sales, for instance. Over the last couple of decades, the Norwegian government has given significant discounts on EV taxes and insurance and a legislated end-date of 2025 for petrol and diesel car sales, but the rate at which Norway dumped its old-style cars surprised even the most optimistic proponents. In the last ten years, the sale of petrol and hybrid cars has plummeted from almost 76% of all new passenger car sales to below 5% this year.

⁠So while you may be thinking that living a more sustainable life is a lonely business sometimes and one that wider society is sluggish to adopt, remember the ripple effect and how it feeds into tipping points that have the power to effect change.

As we tragically discovered with COVID, exponential growth, when it arrives, can alter the trajectory of history.

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