Health and environmental goals and behaviors: parallel and facilitating effects

The concept of behavioral eco-wellness highlights behaviors that simultaneously influence personal health and environmental sustainability, including those relevant to the climate crisis. This study examined health- and environment-related goals and behaviors jointly, addressing the following questions: How important are health and environmental goals? How are these goals associated? How do they associate with behaviors that serve either one or both goals? And how do perceived inter-goal facilitation relations relate to these behaviors?

A sample of 228 participants completed an online questionnaire assessing the importance of health and environmental goals, perceived inter-goal relations, engagement in and expected benefits of four behaviors: reducing red meat consumption and preferring walking or biking over driving, both benefiting health and the environment, and attending recommended health checkups and recycling plastic bottles, which primarily benefit health or the environment, respectively.

Health goals were rated as significantly more important than environmental goals, and the two were positively correlated. The behavior most highly engaged in was attending recommended health checkups, perceived as highly beneficial for health, whereas reducing red meat consumption, perceived as low in benefits for both domains, was least engaged in. Goal importance correlated with single-goal behaviors, whereas behaviors serving both goals showed only weak associations with either goal. Perceived inter-goal facilitation explained additional variance in most behaviors beyond the contributions of each goal's importance.

Health and environmental goals, independently and jointly, help explain relevant behaviors. Goal-behavior relationships differed across behaviors and their perceived benefits.