Recap of breakout-session Promoting Behavioural Change
Each passing year brings the impacts of climate change closer to home. The ripple effects of shifting weather patterns across the world are manifest with negative impacts on ecosystems and human health. Despite the fact that 60% of individuals express concern about climate change [1] behaviour remains largely unchanged. This inertia is also captured by recent findings from meta-analyses on the effectiveness of interventions aimed at promoting sustainable behaviour, which highlight limited success in driving significant behavioural shifts [2].
Against this backdrop, over 100 participants in the breakout session Promoting Behavioural Change explored four behavioural interventions. Each intervention targeted a specific dimension of behavioural change. Reinoud Moojen and Frédérique Rongen presented findings from their experiment on influencing consumer behaviour by leveraging social norms in supermarkets. In a simulated supermarket setting, Inge van den Bijgaart and Joyce Delnoij demonstrated how financial incentives can alter behaviour.
Félice van Nunspeet and Milo Grootjen offered participants an astronaut’s view of Earth, fostering a sense of belonging to and care for our planet. This astronaut’s view resulted in personal promises to the earth. Finally, Robert Weijers and Tannet Duine used Lego to illustrate how a small collaborative exercise may grow into collective motivation for the development of sustainable neighbourhoods.
During the final 30 minutes of the breakout session, we reconvened for a plenary discussion to share and reflect on our experiences. As evidenced by the different interventions explored during the session, it is overly optimistic to assume that a single approach can change all behaviour. Instead, fostering sustainable behaviour requires leveraging various aspects of [3]:
- emphasize climate change as a present, local, and personal risk
- facilitate more affective and experiential engagement
- leverage relevant social group norms
- frame policy solutions in terms of what can be gained from immediate action
- appeal to intrinsically valued long-term environmental goals and outcomes
Even when all these aspects are considered, our efforts are likely to fall short without addressing the broader system. This perspective is best captured by a comment from one of the participants. The layout of a supermarket is intentionally designed to serve a specific purpose. Trying to change behaviour by appealing to social norms within such a system is unlikely to yield results. Instead, system change and behavioural change should be designed in such manner that they reinforce each other if behavioural change is to reduce global emissions by 40-70% [4].
- IPSOS I&O 2024
- Bergquist et al., 2023; Nisa et al., 2019; Van der Linden & Goldberg, 2020; Vlasceanu et al., 2024
- Goldberg et al., 2020; Van der Linden et al. 2016
- IPCC 2022