Tool lists most effective strategies for increasing climate awareness and action

The international study involved more than 59,000 participants from 63 countries, including Brazil. By analyzing interventions that most influence people’s behavior, the work resulted in the creation of a tool that can be used by policymakers and environmental advocacy groups.

By Maria Fernanda Ziegler  |  Agência FAPESP – An article published in the journal Science Advances presents a web tool developed to help policymakers list the most effective themes and messages to increase climate awareness and action around the world. The tool is the result of an extensive study involving about 250 researchers and more than 59,000 participants in 63 countries around the world, including Brazil.

“In addition to the large investments in research aimed at technology and innovation in the field of climate science, it’s extremely important to address the social aspects of the problem. Climate change is a complex problem that requires the population’s understanding and acceptance. For that reason, studies in the field of psychology that assess people’s capacity for acceptance and action are essential. If there’s no acceptance of climate change, there’ll also be no acceptance of new technologies related to carbon storage, renewable sources, or measuring the greenhouse effect, for example,” says Karen Mascarenhas, one of the researchers responsible for the Brazilian part of the study.

Mascarenhas is vice-coordinator of the project on the social perception of energy transition technologies at the Research Center for Greenhouse Gas Innovation (RCGI) – an Engineering Research Center (ERC) created by FAPESP and Shell at the Engineering School of the University of São Paulo (POLI-USP).

In the study, coordinated by the Department of Psychology at New York University in the United States, the researchers used questionnaires to test the effects of 11 interventions and a control situation on four types of behavior: beliefs, support for climate policy, willingness to share climate-related information on social media, and efforts to plant trees.

“We tested the impact of each intervention on people’s perception that climate change exists or on their ability to support climate laws and policies. There was also the question of how much an intervention could influence people’s willingness to share information on their social networks. We also measured the impact of the interventions on a person’s willingness to contribute their efforts to planting trees,” says Mascarenhas.

The researcher explains that the last behavior tested did not require participants to plant trees with their own hands. “A scheme was created in which, if the participants completed a task that required concentration, time, and patience [such as making marks in a text], a tree would be planted. This was all to assess the level of effort they expended under the influence of each intervention. By the end of the study, more than 300,000 trees had been planted,” she reports.

Examples of interventions evaluated included: informing participants that more than 99% of scientists agree that the planet is warming, that climate change exists and is caused by human activity (climate consensus); emphasizing how a single action can affect the future of the planet; writing a letter to a child (son, grandson, nephew, or stepson) about the future; informing participants about catastrophic facts related to climate change.

Target audience

Based on the analysis, a tool was created that takes into account information about each participant’s profile to create different target audience patterns. In this way, the variety of profiles took into account everything from nationality and political ideology to age, gender, education, and income level, for example.

According to Mascarenhas, the study showed that, in general, strategies that bring the problem closer without scaring people are generally more effective. “In general, believing or not believing in climate change is central because it’s a very difficult belief to change. However, we’ve found that strategies such as writing a letter to the future generation, which bring the individual closer to the problem, tend to have a greater impact on actions and behavioral change. But there’s also the risk of scaring them, which can lead to a negative reaction. It’s as if the individual thinks it’s a very big problem that’s impossible to solve, that they can’t deal with on their own,” she explains.

Most importantly, the study revealed that there is no single strategy that will encourage anyone to change their behavior and actions to benefit the climate. “While the responses revealed a global consensus on the dangers of climate change and the importance of implementing mitigation actions at a systemic level, they also showed that there’s a wide variation in the most effective way to communicate the problem. This varies from country to country, but also between different profiles of people in the same country. That’s why it’s so interesting that, as a result of the behavioral study, we’ve built a tool that can list the best strategies according to each person’s profile,” explains Mascarenhas.

The study showed, for example, that while emphasizing the scientific consensus on climate change increased support for climate-friendly policies by 9% in Romania, there was a 5% decrease in Canada. In another example, the strategy of asking study participants to write a letter to a child increased support for climate policies to varying degrees in countries such as the United States (10%), Brazil (10%), Ghana (8%), Russia (7%), and Nigeria (5%).

“Previous studies have assessed the potential for acceptance of individual behaviors, such as separating waste for recycling, using public transport, and conserving electricity. These are examples of studies conducted primarily in the Northern Hemisphere. However, the major difference of this work – apart from its breadth, being a global study – is that it examines collective strategies, actions, and solutions to climate change. This made us want to participate in the research,” says Mascarenhas.

It is worth noting that the Brazilian part of the study involved more than a thousand participants, making it a representative sample of the country’s population. However, the regional results will only be reported in a second article, which is yet to be published.

The study “Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries” can be read at: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj5778.

* Image from Freepik