Should I give up meat? My car? Climate change expert says a cultural shift is needed

When it comes to addressing climate change, some solutions wouldn't really affect our lifestyles, like changing outdated building codes to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

But other solutions have the potential to make a big impact on our lives, like giving up meat or cars.

“That’s something that just doesn’t track well with people,” said Sabina Shaikh, senior instructional professor at the University of Chicago. “And so I think we want to make sure that we capture all those invisible things, but then we also start moving towards the direction of cultural shifts.”

Cultural shifts like reimagining what a city looks like, how transit works, and what we consume.

Shaikh recently spoke at the Chicago Humanities Festival about how cities like Chicago have an outsized impact on the climate and how nature-based solutions can help mitigate the effects of climate change.

In this episode, she talks with Erin Allen about that age-old dilemma: whether addressing climate change should come down to individual responsibility or a broad cultural change … or both.

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