Friday morning, 8:45, Somerset House. GlobeScan and the Forest Stewardship Council had gathered a room to ask how organisations can turn consumer concern into consumer action. It was, by some distance, the most committed audience I have sat with all year. Brands like Lego and Unilever, retailers like Whole Foods, NGOs from five continents, and a genuine warmth of conviction in the room. In a space brimming with eco warriors, Miki and I felt as though we stood out. We had arrived carrying a Middle Eastern perspective, one tinged with hydrocarbons and, at the same time, a real and well funded push for solutions through diversified innovation investment. We were possibly the only people present who came from an economy built on oil that is now spending serious oil money on the alternative to it. That vantage point made me listen to the morning differently, and it left me with a slightly unfashionable conclusion: I think we need more stick and less carrot.
Start with the problem the research describes, because it is more honest than most sustainability talk. GlobeScan’s Healthy and Sustainable Living study, drawn from nearly 32,000 people across more than thirty markets, finds that 72 percent of people say they want to reduce their environmental impact, while only 55 percent have taken any action at all. A gap of seventeen points between what we intend and what we do. Caroline Holme of GlobeScan framed it not as a sustainability failure but as a human one, the same gap that sits between us and our fitness goals or our savings plans. We know. We mostly do not act. Why not? Cost, first and loudest. In the food research with the EAT Foundation, 54 percent name affordability as the barrier. Then availability, then a plain information gap. Layered over all of it is a collapse in trust: three quarters of people now say environmental claims should be verified by an independent body, and brands, sensing the suspicion, are talking about sustainability less than they did a few years ago, not more. Rosie Teasdale of the FSC was refreshingly blunt about the trade off, telling the room that the premium is sometimes real, and that if we are going to save the planet, it might be painful.
The prevailing answer in the room was the carrot. Make the sustainable choice the easy one. Ed Wimpuck of the Behavioural Insights Team explained that information alone only educates so far, and that what actually shifts behaviour is choice architecture: where a product sits on the shelf, how high it ranks on Amazon, and above everything else, what the default is. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly programme is that carrot at scale, a green leaf badge mapped to dozens of certifications, with a sales lift the panel put at roughly twelve to seventeen percent for badged products. The FSC’s quiet masterpiece is humbler still. Recognition of its mark in the UK climbed from 19 percent to about 78 percent over nineteen years, in large part because certified toilet roll quietly became the default on the supermarket shelf.
It is all persuasive, and I still walked out unconvinced that the carrot alone can close a seventeen point gap in the time the science says we have. Nudges work at the margin. They move the already willing. They do very little for the shopper whose eye goes straight to the price, which the same data says is most of us. The single most reliable lever in the whole discussion was mentioned almost in passing: regulation. UK building energy rules have changed real decisions. Carbon figures are starting to appear on menus next to the calories. When a behaviour genuinely matters, we do not gently nudge people toward seat belts or away from smoking indoors. We legislate, and the nudging arrives afterwards to smooth the edges.
There is a complication that cuts against my own argument, and the room felt it. Europe’s Empowering Consumers Directive and its Green Claims work were exactly that, the stick, rules meant to stop greenwashing. The unintended result has been green hushing, brands going silent rather than risk an accusation. So the lesson is not simply more regulation, it is better regulation, the kind that makes a verified claim safe to shout and an empty one expensive to make. Certification is the bridge between the two. Caio Zanardo of Suzano, in Brazil, described third party certification as the external auditor that internal teams and business buyers actually believe. Seth McCurry of the Marine Stewardship Council noted that two thirds of wild caught fish in UK supermarkets now carries an MSC label, and that the early price premium on certified tuna has all but disappeared as the market caught up. Done properly, stick and carrot turn out to be the same instrument held at different ends.
This is where the regional lens earns its place. The Gulf is the easy villain in this story, and the hydrocarbons are not a rumour. But neither is the scale of the response: sovereign capital being pushed into renewables, hydrogen, and a breadth of diversified innovation investment that few carrot led consumer markets could ever finance. Our instinct runs closer to stick than to carrot. Set the standard, mandate it, build the infrastructure, and let behaviour follow the rule rather than waiting a patient nineteen years for a label to shift a nation’s toilet roll. There may be something the Somerset House room could borrow from a region it is more used to lecturing.
The honest takeaway from Friday is that concern is no longer the bottleneck. 57 percent of people already call climate change very serious. The problem is the distance between that feeling and a different choice at the till, and that distance is made mostly of money and friction. You can spend a generation patiently nudging it narrower, or you can change the rules of the shelf. The eco warriors, kind and serious people that they are, would find the second approach heavy handed. From where I was sitting, a little out of place and entirely sincere, it simply looked like the faster way to save the thing the whole room said it loved.
THE SIGNAL
72 percent of people say they want to reduce their environmental impact. Only 55 percent have taken any action. The gap is not concern. It is everything that sits between concern and the checkout.
GlobeScan Healthy and Sustainable Living research, presented at the GlobeScan and FSC event, Somerset House, 26 June 2026
THE QUESTION
If most of your customers already know the better choice and walk past it anyway, is that a marketing problem you can solve, or one that only a rule will fix?