Collective Actions – re-securing our sustainable future [18]

Empowering the conservative middle class to take collective actions to secure a sustainable future

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Collective Actions (CollAct)

Re-securing our sustainable future

Problem Despite widespread awareness of the Climate Crisis, meaningful action has been missing, due to: a) people cannot relate to climate change due to temporal and geographical distance b) political and cultural conflict c) biased processing of information d) a gap between being informed and taking action (Markowitz & Guckian, 2018).

Our research revealed: a) the “conservative middle-class” audience is seldom targeted b) current communication effort can be improved by science c) lack of a central repository for individual climate actions

Solution Knowing your audience is key: The “conservative middle-class”, people aged 40 to 70 years (26% of German population). Their core beliefs relate to traditional values like security, stability and community. Many agree that we need to fight climate change but don’t know where to start. Only few use lifestyle apps, but many are active on social platforms (e.g. www.nebenan.de). Therefore, we want to harness the power of existing community platforms and create a new add-on, along with a simple website promoting the “Renewable Switch”- challenge, a neighbourhood competition to reduce CO2 emissions by re-selecting a green energy provider, because: a) this is the most effective single measure to reduce personal carbon emissions (stated by S4F) b) the possibility of saving money will engage people

We estimate that just the first challenge could lead to CO2 savings as high as 20.000 tons of CO2 per year. Users will see the CO2 reduction of their neighbourhood and, with a carbon emission tracker, they will also see the collective impact they all make. After piloting a prototype in one local neighbourhood, we will expand the prototype to feature challenges proposed by others (e.g. from Climate-Challenge-Hackathon).

What we achieved during this weekend We reviewed research on climate change communication, conducted extensive research on our competitors and our target audience, as well as generated our idea and a visual outline. We further set goals on what to achieve with the first challenge by estimating the potential impact.

Necessities We will continue our science-driven approach by conducting more in-depth user research together with experts in behaviour change, climate communication, gamification, and climate action. We further need web-designers to build the website, developers to create the community platform add-on and will consult community platform owners. We aim to secure funding from climate-focused investment funds or a referral fee from energy providers. Working together with other challenges, a long term goal would be to provide a central repository on our website to access challenges and educational material. With Collective Actions, we will be able to re-secure our sustainable future!

The URL to the pitch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8hogi5cvBI

Speaker: Nicky Dunlop

Built With

  • creativity
  • research
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