Sustainable Actions Index

What we buy, where we work and what we expect from our leaders can all be influenced by our attitudes to climate action. So what can individuals, businesses and governments learn from what shapes our behaviour?
Derived from a survey of 23,000 people across 23 countries, Deloitte’s Sustainable Actions Index shows how small shifts in attitude can add up to big changes as people bring sustainability into their everyday lives. To better understand the individual and collective roles that people play in addressing climate change and sustainability, we asked how sustainability factored into three dimensions of people’s lives:

• Personal choices, covering matters that are more directly under individual control as part of daily habits and purchasing decisions.
• Workplace concerns related to people’s engagement with sustainability at their jobs.
• Citizen actions, including a person’s likelihood of voting for a candidate who supports climate change actions and their support of regulation aimed at climate protection.

What we found was:

• A sense of climate emergency shapes sustainable behaviours: 72% of total respondents believe climate change is an emergency – those that held this belief were the ones working most actively on sustainable behaviours across all dimensions of their lives.
• Experiencing climate change can spark action: Across every index domain, those who reported recently experiencing a climate-related event were more likely to be standard-setters.
• A positive message has a positive impact: Those who are extremely optimistic that the world will take sufficient steps to address climate change were also those who more often behaved in sustainable ways. For business leaders and policymakers, this is an opportunity to focus on messaging that emphasises the positive potential outcomes of sustainability actions.
  
  

To find out more, read the full report on Deloitte Insights.