(Press-News.org) Lifestyle changes for demand-side climate change mitigation is gaining more and more importance and attention. A new IIASA-led study set out to understand the full potential of behavior change and what drives such changes in people's choices across the world using data from almost two billion Facebook profiles.
Modern consumption patterns, and especially livestock production in the agricultural sector to sustain the world's growing appetite for animal products, are contributing to and speeding the advance of interconnected issues like climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss. Our current way of life is simply not sustainable. It is clear that there needs to be a step-change in our behavior and consumption patterns to ensure that those that come after us have a healthy, life-sustaining planet to call home. Getting a large number of people with vastly different beliefs and values to change their consumption patterns and behavior is however not a simple matter.
While many previous studies have looked into the drivers of low-carbon lifestyles in general and sustainable diets in particular, the data they employed have often been based on a limited number of countries, or a limited number of survey respondents whose reported information sometimes varied from their actual behavior. In their study published in Environmental Research Letters, IIASA researcher Sibel Eker and her colleagues, made use of online social media data, particularly anonymous Facebook audience size data, as a global data source to represent the online behavior of billions of people in order to complement more traditional empirical studies.
"We were interested in finding out if we could use the data available on the social media platform Facebook to quantify the level of interest in sustainable diets, such as vegetarianism, in different countries around the world and to determine whether their online activity actually represents a real-life interest in vegetarianism and consumption patterns," Eker explains. "In addition, we wanted to see what other factors such as education level, age, gender, or the GDP per capita, play a role in determining people's interest in sustainable diets in different countries."
In this regard, Eker and her colleagues created a dataset of daily and monthly active users who indicated having an interest in sustainable lifestyles, particularly vegetarianism. Their choice of the term vegetarianism was motivated by the breadth of the term compared to other terms like "plant-based diets" or "sustainable diets", and its availability as a pre-defined interest choice on the Facebook advertising platform.
"Our choice of vegetarianism and sustainable living as interest categories relevant for low-carbon lifestyles was based on a keyword search on the Facebook Marketing API in which they emerged as the ones with the highest global audience size among the available interest categories. A person's interest in vegetarianism can stem from a number of things ranging from animal welfare, to health, or religion. In the context of this study, we saw vegetarianism in particular, as an indicator of the spread of meat-free diets, which is more relevant for estimating food demand, rather than as an indicator of people's interest in a vegetarian lifestyle purely for environmental reasons," notes Eker.
The publicly available and anonymous data was retrieved from the Facebook marketing Application Programming Interface (API) at multiple points between September 2019 and June 2020 for the interest category, age, gender, education level, and country of each user. The dataset used covers a total of 131 countries and around 1.9 billion people, of which 210 million indicated an interest in vegetarianism, and 33 million indicated an interest in sustainable living.
The results indicate that the fraction of the Facebook audience interested in vegetarianism positively correlates with the rate of decline of meat consumption at the country level (in the countries with high vegetarianism interest) - in other words, the more people are interested in following a vegetarian diet, the steeper the declining trend of meat consumption in the country. Meat consumption levels overall were higher in high-income countries than in the low-income ones, but the interest in sustainable diets, as much as it is expressed online, seemed to be higher in those countries too, which, according to the researchers, is promising for trends towards more sustainable and equitable meat consumption.
Education, which has previously been shown to be a catalyst to achieve the SDGs, could be a catalyst here too, unless superseded by high-income levels, since it emerged as the most important factor affecting interest in vegetarianism. This effect was more pronounced in low-income countries. Gender also emerged as a very strong distinguishing factor, with women tending to have a higher interest in vegetarianism than men. GDP per capita and age followed these two indicators in terms of their effect on people's interest in a vegetarian lifestyle.
"Our study shows that online social media data can indeed be useful to analyze and estimate food consumption trends. While the importance of education, income, and gender was previously known based on local studies, we ranked them for the first time on a global scale," says Eker. "Policies that are designed to stimulate adoption of sustainable diets, especially communication policies, should take the social heterogeneity and existing tendencies - which could be low hanging fruit - into account. Heterogeneity across countries also plays an important role, and studies like ours help to understand international differences and to design local customized policies."
INFORMATION:
Reference
Eker, S., Garcia, D., Valin, H., van Ruijven, B. (2021). Using social media audience data to analyze the drivers of low-carbon diets. Environmental Research Letters DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/abf770
Contacts:
Researcher contact
Sibel Eker
Research Scholar
Sustainable Service Systems Research Group
Energy, Climate, and Environment Program
Tel: +43 2236 807 580
eker@iiasa.ac.at
Press Officer
Ansa Heyl
IIASA Press Office
Tel: +43 2236 807 574
Mob: +43 676 83 807 574
heyl@iiasa.ac.at
About IIASA:
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an international scientific institute that conducts research into the critical issues of global environmental, economic, technological, and social change that we face in the twenty-first century. Our findings provide valuable options to policymakers to shape the future of our changing world. IIASA is independent and funded by prestigious research funding agencies in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. http://www.iiasa.ac.at
Imagine flexible surgical instruments that can twist and turn in all directions like miniature octopus arms, or how about large and powerful robot tentacles that can work closely and safely with human workers on production lines. A new generation of robotic tools are beginning to be realized thanks to a combination of strong 'muscles' and sensitive 'nerves' created from smart polymeric materials. A research team led by the smart materials experts Professor Stefan Seelecke and Junior Professor Gianluca Rizzello at Saarland University is exploring fundamental aspects of this exciting field of soft robotics.
In the factory of ...
As well as bright colours and subtle scents, flowers possess many invisible ways of attracting their pollinators, and a new study shows that bumblebees may use the humidity of a flower to tell them about the presence of nectar, according to scientists at the Universities of Bristol and Exeter.
This new research has shown that bumblebees are able to accurately detect and choose between flowers that have different levels of humidity next to the surface of the flower.
The study, published this week in the Journal of Experimental Biology, showed that bees could be trained to differentiate between two types of artificial flower with different levels of humidity, if only one of the types of flower provided the bee with a reward of sugar water.
To make sure that the artificial flowers ...
Augmented reality (AR) is poised to revolutionise the way people complete essential everyday tasks, yet older adults - who have much to gain from the technology - will be excluded from using it unless more thought goes into designing software that makes sense to them.
The danger of older adults falling through the gaps has been highlighted by research carried out by scientists at the University of Bath in the UK in collaboration with designers from the Bath-based charity Designability. A paper describing their work has received an honourable mention at this year's Human Computer Interaction Conference (CHI2021) - the world's largest conference of its kind.
The ...
According to a recent study, open learning spaces are not directly associated with the physical activity of students in grades 3 and 5, even though more breaks from sedentary time were observed in open learning spaces compared to conventional classrooms.
The findings are based on the CHIPASE study, carried out at the Faculty of Sport and Health Science of the University of Jyväskylä. The results were published in Frontiers of Sports and Active Life.
After the reform of the national core curriculum for basic education in Finland, issued in 2016, most of the new or renovated comprehensive schools in Finland began to incorporate ...
The way in which a compound inspired by nature produces hydrogen has now been described in detail for the first time by an international research team from the University of Jena, Germany and the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy. These findings are the foundation for the energy-efficient production of hydrogen as a sustainable energy source.
Nature as a model
There are naturally occurring microorganisms that produce hydrogen, using special enzymes called hydrogenases. "What is special about hydrogenases is that they generate hydrogen catalytically. Unlike electrolysis, which ...
The relationship between personality, genes and chronotype (sleep patterns) has been studied by researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Tartu, Estonia
People high in Conscientiousness and low in Openness are rather morning people; lower-level personality traits such as self-discipline, excitement-seeking, and straightforwardness have also been linked to chronotype
It is partly due to genetic factors, but there is scope to change your sleep patterns if you wanted to become a morning person but are currently an evening person for example
The link between the different hierarchies of personality, sleep patterns and even genetics has been discovered by ...
Coastal wetlands like seagrass meadows, mangroves, and salt marshes play vital roles along the shoreline, from providing a buffer against storm surges, to providing critical habitat for animals, to capturing atmospheric carbon.
We are still just beginning to comprehend the intricate workings of these highly productive ecosystems and their role in mitigating the climate crisis, but UConn researchers are one step closer to understanding how salt marsh vegetation, their bacterial communities, and vegetation can help predict a marsh's potential to be a blue carbon reservoir. The research was recently published in the journal Estuaries and Coasts.
"Coastal marshes are increasingly recognized as important ecosystems because they sequester and store a lot of carbon. There is ...
Most of us have genetic variations that increase the risk of medicinal products not being effective. In order to provide a more effective treatment with fewer side effects, we need to analyse more of these genetic variations. This will provide us with more precise knowledge about how the individual patient reacts to medicinal products. A new research result from Aarhus University shows that.
Personalised medicine has been a hot topic in recent years, using information about the genes to adapt the treatment to the individual patient. Personalised medicine potentially provides better treatment and fewer side effects for the patient. At least in ...
WASHINGTON, June 22, 2021 -- About 2.2 billion people globally lack reliable access to clean drinking water, according to the United Nations, and the growing impacts of climate change are likely to worsen this reality.
Solar steam generation (SSG) has emerged as a promising renewable energy technology for water harvesting, desalination, and purification that could benefit people who need it most in remote communities, disaster-relief areas, and developing nations. In Applied Physics Letters, by AIP Publishing, Virginia Tech researchers developed a synthetic tree to enhance SSG.
SSG turns solar energy into heat. Water from a storage ...
A team of scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich has now discovered that the odorant receptor OR5K1 is specialized to recognize pyrazines in both humans and domesticated animals. These are volatile substances that contribute to the typical odor of many vegetables or are formed when food is heated. In addition, pyrazines also play a role as signaling substances in intra- or interspecific communication. The new research results contribute to a better understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the odor perception ...