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The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply disrupted society´s priorities and individuals’ lifestyles with major implications for sustainable development. Economic shutdown and social isolation reduced society's ecological footprint by lowering transportation and industrial activity while prompting families to engage in non-commercialized modes of leisure and social relations. Yet economic recession has intensified problems of under-consumption and poverty, while social isolation has worsened physical and mental illness. The pandemic's short-term effects are visible to everyone experiencing it, yet the global health crisis will also have long-term effects which are presently unknown but whose configurations can be spotted by identifying scenarios based upon individual relations with their material, symbolic and social environments. This perspective article reviews changes in two critical domains of practice: consumption and social relations, based on a theory of scarcity, and proposes an approach to foresee post-COVID-19 scenarios across several areas of social practice. The experience of scarcity in consumption and socializing redefines priorities and values yielding two ideal-types of responses for each domain: the assimilation of reduced levels of material wellbeing and social interactions or the drive for self-indulgence to compensate sacrifices in those areas. Four different lifestyle scenarios are thereby generated based on that analytical framework, enabling the identification of long-term scenarios, beyond the simplistic old normal versus new normal dichotomy. Grounded in available secondary data and relying on the recent Brazilian experience, which can be generalized to other Global South contexts, this proposed framework illustrates distinctive behavioral patterns for each lifestyle across ten areas of practice.

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BackgroundWearing a pollution mask is an effective, practical, and economic way to prevent the inhalation of dangerous particulate matter (PM). However, it is not uncommon to observe negligence in adopting such behaviour, and this especially among young segments of the population. Using the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) as conceptual framework, this study explores the role of socio-cognitive factors that affect the decision of wearing a pollution mask in the context of young educated people. This is done by selecting a sample of college students in urban China, a country that has seen air quality as one of the major challenges in the last decades. While young urban college students might be expected to be receptive to standard attempts to be influenced through reason-based cognitive stimuli, it is often found that this is not the case. The empirical analysis was articulated it in two steps. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was first used to examine the relationships among the conceptual constructs derived from the TPB conceptual model, and second Step-Wise Ordinary Least Squares Regressions (SWOLS) were employed to observe the partial effect played by each item on the decision to wear a mask.ResultsResults show that, while reason-based stimuli play a role, attitude, social norm, and self-efficacy were the most important predictors of the behavioural intention (p < 0.01). The role of past behaviour was also acknowledged as strongly associated with the dependent variable (p < 0.01). Overall, the likelihood of wearing a pollution mask increases with the importance of others socio-cognitive and psychological factors, which could help understand behavioural biases, and explain the relative role of several mechanisms behind the decision to wear a mask.ConclusionsWhile tackling pollution requires multiple and synergic approaches, encouraging self-prevention using pollution mask is a simple and effective action, implementable at negligible costs. Resistance among younger, well-educated cohorts to wear masks can be overcome by stressing the social desirability of action and the sense of empowerment derived from its usage. This study has the potential to inform policies aimed at changing suboptimal behavioural attitudes by identifying triggers for change, and it could serve in improving the tailoring of health promotion messages aimed at nudging healthy behaviour.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12992-018-0441-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.