Accelerating climate action by leveraging behavioural change.
To limit global warming to 1.5C and adapt to the consequences of climate change, system transitions are urgently needed. Government intervention in the form of climate policy is key to make these transitions happen. While such policy is currently successful in spurring technological change, it is less effective at inducing behavioural change that sticks. ChangeAble identifies the dynamics between climate policy, behaviour and other enabling conditions as key for successful government intervention for system transitions. In addition, climate policy often does not make use of the societal potential for change. Policymakers could benefit from insights resulting from the latest research, in particular the insight that behavioural change can be enabled through changing the context in which people make decisions, as well as from insights into society’s appetite to adopt more sustainable behaviour, which is actually higher than often assumed.
ChangeAble aims to enhance society's ability to address and adapt to climate change through more effective, efficient, acceptable and just climate policy, and to empower policymakers to design and implement policies that foster behaviour change. The societal impacts of ChangeAble include more effective and behaviour-sensitive climate policy, more actionable knowledge amongst policymakers, and more depth in the literature on social tipping dynamics and quantitative and qualitative dynamics between climate policy and behaviour. We achieve these impacts through an emphasis on productive interactions between researchers, policymakers and other societal stakeholders. During these interactions, they co-create the research design and the interventions in the five key policy areas. This research involves diagnostic and empirical work combined with research aimed at understanding interventions and their effects. To do this, besides the transdisciplinary research, ChangeAble involves many different disciplines including environmental psychology, communication science, policy and transition studies and mathematics.
