Our move towards a more sustainable future requires us to adopt technologies that promote sustainability, as well as to internalize behavioural changes which reduce our demand for energy, water, food, and other natural resources. This issue of TerraGreen addresses both these challenges.

Our cover story on the genetic modification of crops focusses on the very difficult dilemma of choosing technologies with short-term sure-fire gains, but with the possibility of longer-term environmental risks, often of an unknown nature.  This is the most difficult of all technological dilemmas: picking the “known-knowns” against “unknown-unknowns”. This posits that on the one hand, we have to invest in creating scientific knowledge which helps us to turn the “unknown-unknowns”, into, at least, “unknown-knowns”, and on the other hand to set up agile regulatory structures empowered to take the “unknown-unknowns” into account in their decision-making.

The special report on behavioural environmental management focusses on looking at ourselves and our decisions.  We make many decisions at work and home every day which have environmental consequences—mostly minimal, but some of major magnitude. For example, every hour of additional air conditioning, and every additional degree of extra coolth that we desire, also spells major increases in the electricity that has to be supplied, and in the greenhouse gas emissions emitted.  Even more significantly, each extra hour and each extra degree of coolth increases the amount of electricity generation capacity that has to be built and kept on-line to meet our electricity needs for a few hours each year, leading to inefficient use of resources. What are the nudges that can help us in our decision making? 

Information, for one, is often useful, especially when presented in a comparative form that allows us to assess the difference between various options in front of us.  The star labelling programme of the Bureau of Energy Efficiency has very effectively brought energy consumption into the calculus of decision-making in the buying of refrigerators, air conditioners, etc.  However, very often, information alone is not enough; price signals, specific energy consumption regulations, and other instruments have also been effective in India in influencing our decision-making regarding energy-consumption choices.  Clearly, we need a broader conversation about the nudges and instruments that can help each one of us to become better decision-makers in protecting the environment.