ARE you suffering from affluenza? In his book on the subject, Dr Clive Hamilton, former head of the Australia Institute, described it as “people spending money they don’t have to buy goods they don’t need to impress people they don’t like”.

Australians, he says, are in the grip of an over-consumption binge, fuelled by credit cards and loans, in an insatiable drive to have more stuff. They share affluenza with the rest of the Western world, while people in many developing nations, particularly China and India, aspire to the same condition.

Author John Naish recently hypothesised in his book, Enough, that humankind’s pursuit of excess is a primitive – but redundant – survival strategy that enabled us to survive thousands of years of famine, flood and disease.

But affluenza is making the planet sick. Burning fossil fuels in a desperate bid for energy to produce stuff is the main driver of carbon emissions that have led to global warming, while land clearing and unprecedented population growth place further stress on Earth.

In a paper published in Nature, American think tank the Worldwatch Institute says the world’s ecological capacity is simply insufficient to satisfy the consuming passions of every nation.

If China and India, each with more than a billion people, were to match our per capita use of resources by 2030, “together they would require a full planet Earth to meet their needs”, it says.

CSIRO senior social scientist Peta Ashworth says Australians – the highest per capita producers of greenhouse gases in the world – are well aware of environmental problems.

“Our research shows that 93 to 95 per cent of people know climate change is a critical issue, but many of them don’t necessarily realise their behaviour contributes to the problem,” she says.

Ms Ashworth leads a team that is researching the community’s complex attitudes to climate change, and whether scientists can use their expertise to help transform those attitudes into behaviour change.

“We have worked out that 30 per cent of the community are definitely concerned about climate change and are already actively changing their behaviour, whether it is using recyclable bags or getting information about solar heating,” she says.

The idea is to harness the enthusiasm of these “engaged citizens” in a way that influences their family, friends and colleagues to also change their behaviour.

In Newcastle Ms Ashworth’s team is trialling Energymark, where small groups of people, led by an enthusiastic volunteer, meet for a series of discussions on global warming and related issues.

The groups are provided with a toolkit that includes eight factsheets. Among the first activities they are asked to do is work out their carbon footprints: “Most people are absolutely shocked when they discover the huge footprint their buying habits have created.”

She says the format is based on workshops devised and run by CSIRO that have already proved their medium-term effectiveness.

“You turn the light on for people and you start to get behaviour change,” she says. “We got people back after six months and found that they had spoken to their friends and their parents and influenced other people to make greener choices.”

CSIRO is not, however, trying to challenge the “I consume, therefore I am” ethos. “We are not there to advocate, but to mitigate. There is a great role that we (CSIRO) can play here as a knowledge broker.”

She hopes Energymark will be rolled out to other states, supported by a website.

“One day it would be great to have social scientists based at universities to co-ordinate the program.”

She is currently co-writing CSIRO’s next major publication, a guide to low-carbon living.

“What gives me hope is that I really believe most people want to be good corporate citizens,” she says. “Money is an incentive which can flick people on to more sustainable choices, but they already have to be aware and believe. This is why education is crucial.”

CSIRO’s strategy may sound familiar to Dr Lucy Sheehy. As a PhD student in 2002, she approached the City of Fremantle with her idea for a behaviour change project focused on environmental issues.

The project eventually became Living Smart, a series of seven workshops, educating people on everything from water use to saving electricity.

“I wanted to test the effectiveness of goal setting in behaviour change,” she says.

“When people go to a workshop, they get a lot of information and then they are just left by themselves to find the time and motivation to enact what they have learned. If you set them a goal to change something – big or small – and if they do nothing else except that, then at least that one thing has been achieved.”

Living Smart won a Eureka Prize in 2004 and has recently been picked up by the State Government and rolled out in Joondalup and Mandurah.

Dr Sheehy, however, is realistic about bridging the chasm between education and sustained changes in behaviour.

“Research shows that the maximum number of people you can effect behaviour change with is 20 per cent,” she says.

“There are quite a few reasons for this. One is force of habit. It is comparatively easy to decide to buy a triple-A rated washing machine, but to make sure you do a cold wash every time you use it will be much more difficult to sustain.

“Cost is a factor, but an even bigger factor is convenience. Recycling is the classic case. When people had to pile their newspapers and bottles in the car and take them down to a depot, there was a very low level of recycling. When that was replaced with bins out the front of their houses, the level of recycling participation increased hugely.”

What is important, she says, is for scientists to keep speaking out. “The message has to saturate everywhere; not just at work or at home but out shopping and in the news, everywhere.”