Interview: practitioners on Behavior change & climate communications — what they wish they knew earlier

According to the UK Climate Change Committee's 2024 Progress Report, approximately 62% of the emissions reductions required to meet Britain's 2030 targets depend on changes in individual and organisational behaviour—yet only 23% of climate communications campaigns demonstrate measurable behavioural outcomes. This stark implementation gap reveals a critical tension that sustainability practitioners across the United Kingdom are grappling with daily: the chasm between knowing what messages resonate and actually translating that awareness into sustained action at scale.

We spoke with behaviour change specialists, corporate sustainability leads, and policy advisors across the UK who shared candid reflections on what surprised them, what failed spectacularly, and what they would do differently if starting their climate communications journeys again. Their insights reveal that effective behaviour change is less about crafting the perfect message and more about understanding the invisible systems, incentives, and bottlenecks that determine whether communication translates into action.

Why It Matters

The UK's legally binding commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 cannot be met through technological solutions alone. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero's 2024 analysis indicates that behavioural interventions could deliver up to 30% of required emissions reductions across transport, buildings, and consumption patterns. Yet the translation of this potential into practice remains profoundly challenging.

In 2024, UK household emissions from heating remained stubbornly high, with only 7.5% of homes having installed heat pumps despite years of awareness campaigns about their benefits. Meanwhile, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that UK food waste—much of it driven by consumer behaviour—accounts for approximately 9.5 million tonnes annually, representing both substantial emissions and a significant behaviour change opportunity.

The financial stakes are equally compelling. Research from the Behavioural Insights Team published in early 2025 demonstrated that organisations implementing evidence-based behaviour change approaches achieved 2.4 times greater return on their sustainability communications investments compared to traditional awareness-raising campaigns. For founders building climate solutions, understanding these dynamics is not optional—it is fundamental to commercial viability.

The UK context presents unique opportunities and challenges. Post-Brexit regulatory flexibility has enabled experimentation with carbon border adjustment mechanisms and Scope 3 reporting requirements that create new incentive structures. Simultaneously, the cost-of-living pressures that intensified through 2023-2024 have fundamentally reshaped how climate messaging must be framed to resonate with audiences whose immediate economic concerns often overshadow longer-term environmental considerations.

Key Concepts

Behaviour Change Communication: The strategic use of communication to influence knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to climate action. Unlike awareness-raising, behaviour change communication is explicitly designed around specific, measurable behavioural outcomes and typically employs insights from behavioural science regarding friction, defaults, social norms, and commitment devices.

Scope 3 Emissions Engagement: Scope 3 encompasses all indirect emissions occurring in an organisation's value chain, both upstream and downstream. Effective Scope 3 reduction fundamentally requires influencing the behaviour of suppliers, customers, and other stakeholders—making behaviour change communication an operational necessity rather than a marketing function.

Industrial Policy and Behaviour Nexus: The UK's industrial policy framework increasingly recognises that technology deployment and behaviour change are co-dependent. Policies such as the Green Finance Strategy and the Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge explicitly incorporate behavioural considerations, requiring practitioners to navigate the intersection of regulatory compliance and voluntary behaviour modification.

Transition Plans: Under emerging UK Transition Plan Taskforce disclosure requirements, organisations must articulate credible pathways to net-zero, including how they will influence stakeholder behaviours. This elevates behaviour change from a communications concern to a governance and reporting obligation with material implications for investment and regulatory compliance.

Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAM): The UK Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, scheduled for implementation in 2027, will impose carbon costs on certain imports. For practitioners, CBAM creates new communication challenges and opportunities: explaining complex regulatory requirements to supply chain partners while potentially leveraging carbon pricing as a behaviour change lever.

What's Working and What Isn't

What's Working

Hyper-Local Framing with Tangible Co-Benefits: Practitioners consistently reported that climate communications succeeded when they connected global challenges to immediate, local, and personally relevant benefits. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority's retrofit programme saw 340% higher engagement when messaging emphasised warmer homes and lower bills rather than carbon reduction. As one sustainability director noted: "We stopped talking about saving the planet and started talking about saving money while staying warm. Everything changed."

Defaults and Choice Architecture: Several practitioners highlighted the transformative impact of restructuring choice environments rather than attempting to persuade. Switching workplace pension defaults to sustainable funds—as implemented by NEST Pensions for their 12 million members—achieved 94% participation compared to 12% opt-in rates for identical funds. This approach circumvents many traditional communication challenges entirely.

Social Proof at Scale: Digital platforms enabling visible collective action have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness. The Big Plastic Count, coordinated by Greenpeace UK and Everyday Plastic, mobilised over 250,000 UK households in 2024 to audit their plastic waste. Participants who could see their community's aggregate data were 67% more likely to subsequently reduce single-use plastic consumption. The key insight: people respond to evidence that their neighbours are acting.

Segmentation Beyond Demographics: Successful practitioners moved beyond age and location-based targeting toward values-based and behaviour-based segmentation. One energy company executive shared: "We had been targeting 'young urban professionals' with identical messages for years. When we shifted to segmenting by actual energy usage patterns and life stage triggers—moving home, having children—our conversion rates tripled."

What Isn't Working

Information Deficit Assumptions: The most consistently cited failure was continuing to operate on the assumption that providing more information leads to behaviour change. Multiple practitioners described investing substantially in educational content that achieved high engagement metrics but no measurable behavioural outcomes. As one policy advisor reflected: "We produced beautiful explainer videos about Scope 3 emissions. They were watched millions of times. Supply chain emissions continued rising."

Fear-Based Messaging Without Agency: Practitioners reported that doom-laden communications without clear, accessible action pathways consistently backfired. Research from Climate Outreach published in 2024 confirmed that fear messaging increased anxiety but decreased perceived self-efficacy among UK audiences. Several interviewees described this as their most consequential early mistake: "We thought urgency would motivate people. Instead, we paralysed them."

One-Size-Fits-All Campaigns: National campaigns that failed to account for regional economic contexts, cultural differences, and existing infrastructure consistently underperformed. The initial framing of electric vehicle adoption campaigns in rural Scotland—where charging infrastructure remained sparse and driving distances longer—generated significant backlash that required costly remediation.

Ignoring Structural Barriers: Perhaps most critically, practitioners acknowledged that behaviour change communications often fail because they attempt to address behavioural symptoms rather than structural causes. As one corporate sustainability lead stated bluntly: "We spent two years encouraging employees to take public transport. Then we realised our office location made this physically impossible for 70% of staff. The communications were not the problem."

Key Players

Established Leaders

1. Behavioural Insights Team (BIT): Originally a UK government unit, BIT pioneered the application of behavioural science to public policy and now operates globally. Their climate-focused work includes designing interventions for energy efficiency, sustainable transport, and consumption reduction across UK government departments.

2. Climate Outreach: Oxford-based organisation specialising in climate communication research and practice. Their work on values-based messaging and audience segmentation has influenced approaches across UK civil society, government, and corporate sustainability teams.

3. Carbon Trust: Provides advisory services helping organisations communicate sustainability initiatives and engage supply chains. Their Scope 3 engagement methodologies are widely adopted across UK industry sectors.

4. Energy Saving Trust: Delivers behaviour change programmes focused on household energy efficiency across the UK, with particular expertise in translating technical information into accessible communications for diverse audiences.

5. WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme): Leads major UK behaviour change initiatives including Love Food Hate Waste, demonstrating sustained success in shifting consumer behaviours around food waste through evidence-based communication strategies.

Emerging Startups

1. Giki Zero: Provides personalised carbon footprint tracking for consumers and employees, enabling organisations to engage stakeholders through individualised behaviour change pathways rather than generic messaging.

2. Pawprint: Offers employee engagement platforms enabling companies to connect sustainability communications with measurable individual actions, tracking behaviour change at organisational scale.

3. Do Nation: Creates digital pledge platforms that translate awareness into specific behavioural commitments, partnering with UK councils and corporations to move beyond awareness-raising to action.

4. Alectro: Specialises in making sustainability data accessible and actionable for businesses, addressing the communication gap between technical carbon accounting and operational decision-making.

5. Supercritical: While primarily focused on carbon removal procurement, has developed innovative approaches to communicating complex climate solutions to corporate decision-makers unfamiliar with climate science.

Key Investors & Funders

1. NESTA: The UK innovation foundation has consistently funded behaviour change research and practice through its sustainable future portfolio, supporting both early-stage ventures and scaling proven approaches.

2. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI): Through the Strategic Priorities Fund and other mechanisms, UKRI has invested substantially in behaviour change research, including the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST).

3. Esmée Fairbairn Foundation: Major UK charitable foundation with significant environmental portfolio, funding organisations developing evidence-based approaches to climate behaviour change.

4. Environmental Funders Network: Coordinates funding across UK environmental philanthropy, increasingly prioritising behaviour change and public engagement alongside traditional conservation and advocacy.

5. Quadrature Climate Foundation: Established by the UK-based quantitative trading firm, this foundation has committed over £100 million to climate solutions, including investments in behaviour change research and scaling.

Examples

1. Transport for London's ULEZ Expansion Communications (2023-2024): The Ultra Low Emission Zone expansion to Greater London required communicating complex regulatory requirements while managing political opposition. TfL deployed targeted communications emphasising health benefits in areas with highest air pollution exposure. Post-implementation surveys indicated 73% of affected residents understood the scheme requirements, and vehicle compliance rates exceeded projections by 18%. The key lesson: framing regulation as health protection rather than restriction fundamentally altered public reception.

2. Tesco's Scope 3 Supplier Engagement Programme (2024-2025): Facing the challenge of engaging over 10,000 suppliers on emissions reduction, Tesco developed tiered communication strategies based on supplier size and capability. For SME suppliers, simplified carbon literacy modules achieved 89% completion rates. The programme identified that communication frequency mattered less than communication clarity—suppliers receiving quarterly detailed guidance outperformed those receiving monthly generic updates by 2.3 times on emissions reduction targets.

3. Welsh Government's Warmer Homes Wales Campaign (2024): This initiative combined behaviour change communications with practical retrofit support, targeting fuel-poor households. By framing energy efficiency as poverty reduction rather than climate action, and by embedding trusted community organisations as messengers, the programme achieved 156% of its year-one installation targets. Exit surveys revealed that 82% of participants cited financial benefits as their primary motivation, while 91% reported increased awareness of climate connections as a secondary outcome.

Action Checklist

• Conduct audience segmentation based on values and existing behaviours rather than demographics alone
• Audit current communications for information-deficit assumptions and revise to incorporate behavioural science principles
• Map structural barriers that may undermine behaviour change messaging and address infrastructure gaps where possible
• Develop specific, measurable behavioural outcome metrics for all climate communications initiatives
• Establish feedback mechanisms to demonstrate collective impact and leverage social proof dynamics
• Partner with trusted local messengers rather than relying solely on institutional communications channels
• Test fear-based messaging against agency-based alternatives through controlled experiments
• Review Scope 3 engagement approaches to ensure communications match supplier capability and context
• Integrate behaviour change considerations into transition planning and disclosure frameworks
• Allocate resources for longitudinal evaluation to distinguish short-term awareness from sustained behaviour change

FAQ

Q: How do we measure behaviour change rather than just awareness or engagement? A: Effective measurement requires defining specific target behaviours upfront and establishing baseline metrics before communications launch. Avoid proxy metrics like video views or social shares. Instead, track actual behavioural outcomes: energy consumption data, purchase patterns, transport mode choices, or supply chain emissions. Where direct measurement is impossible, use validated behavioural intention scales and follow up with verification samples. The Behavioural Insights Team recommends randomised controlled trials where feasible, but even quasi-experimental designs with comparison groups substantially improve measurement validity.

Q: What is the appropriate balance between individual behaviour change and systemic advocacy? A: Practitioners increasingly reject this as a false dichotomy. Individual behaviour change and systemic change are mutually reinforcing when properly designed. Citizens who adopt sustainable behaviours often become advocates for systemic change, while systemic changes create enabling conditions for individual action. The key is avoiding communications that place disproportionate responsibility on individuals for problems requiring structural solutions. Frame individual actions as contributions to collective momentum rather than substitutes for policy change.

Q: How do we communicate about climate without alienating audiences who reject climate science? A: Research from Climate Outreach demonstrates that many climate-relevant behaviours can be promoted without explicit climate framing. Energy efficiency resonates through cost savings and comfort. Local air quality connects to immediate health. Food waste reduction appeals through frugality and practical household management. For audiences where climate framing creates reactance, these co-benefit frames achieve equivalent or superior behavioural outcomes. However, avoid deceptive communications—when directly asked, be honest about climate connections while maintaining focus on the audience's priority concerns.

Q: What role should carbon pricing and financial incentives play alongside communications? A: Behavioural science consistently shows that financial incentives work best when combined with strategic communications rather than replacing them. Price signals create attention and motivation; communications channel that motivation into specific actions. The UK's CBAM implementation offers an instructive case: affected importers need both the price signal and extensive communications support to translate regulatory requirements into operational changes. Practitioners report that communications explaining why a price exists and how to respond achieve substantially better outcomes than price alone.

Q: How do we maintain long-term behaviour change rather than temporary shifts? A: Sustained behaviour change requires moving beyond one-off campaigns toward ongoing engagement systems. Key strategies include: creating new habits through repeated prompts during formation windows; building identity connections so that sustainable behaviours become self-reinforcing; establishing community structures that provide ongoing social support; and removing friction from sustainable choices so they become default rather than deliberate. Practitioners who achieved lasting change consistently described multi-year engagement strategies rather than campaign-based approaches.

Sources

• UK Climate Change Committee. (2024). Progress in Reducing Emissions: 2024 Report to Parliament. London: Climate Change Committee.

• Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. (2024). Net Zero Strategy: Behavioural Insights Analysis. London: HMSO.

• Behavioural Insights Team. (2025). Behaviour Change for Net Zero: A Return on Investment Analysis. London: BIT.

• Climate Outreach. (2024). Britain Talks Climate: Updated Findings on Effective Climate Communication. Oxford: Climate Outreach.

• UK Transition Plan Taskforce. (2024). Disclosure Framework: Implementation Guidance. London: TPT.

• WRAP. (2024). UK Food Waste Estimates: Annual Update. Banbury: WRAP.

• Stern, N. et al. (2024). "Behaviour Change and Climate Policy: An Integrated Framework." Nature Climate Change, 14(3), 245-253.