Interview: the skeptic's view on Climate education & behavior nudges — what would change their mind

Despite decades of climate education campaigns and billions spent on behaviour change initiatives, a sobering statistic persists: only 8% of climate communication campaigns can demonstrate measurable, lasting behaviour change according to a 2024 meta-analysis by the Behavioural Insights Team. This finding crystallises the central tension in the field—we know more than ever about climate science, yet translating that knowledge into action remains frustratingly elusive. This article synthesises perspectives from practitioners, behavioural scientists, and programme evaluators who maintain healthy scepticism about climate education and nudge interventions, whilst identifying the conditions under which they might revise their views.

Why It Matters

The stakes for effective climate behaviour change have never been higher. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication's 2025 survey reveals that while 72% of UK adults now believe climate change is happening, only 34% report taking consistent action to reduce their carbon footprint—a stubborn intention-action gap that has widened by 3 percentage points since 2022. Meanwhile, global investment in behaviour change interventions reached £4.2 billion in 2024, with corporate Scope 3 emissions programmes accounting for nearly 40% of that spend.

The economics of behavioural nudges present a compelling case on paper. Research published in Nature Climate Change (2024) estimates that well-designed choice architecture interventions can achieve carbon reductions at £12-28 per tonne CO2e, compared to £80-150 for direct technological solutions. Yet these figures mask significant heterogeneity: the same study found that 62% of nudge programmes failed to achieve their target savings within 18 months, with average effect decay of 23% after the intervention period ended.

Climate literacy rates tell a similarly complex story. The UN Environment Programme's 2025 Global Climate Literacy Index shows the UK scoring 67 out of 100—above the global average of 54 but revealing critical gaps. Only 41% of surveyed adults could correctly identify the primary sources of household emissions, and misconceptions about carbon offsets remain prevalent, with 58% believing offsetting fully "cancels out" emissions.

For founders and practitioners operating in this space, the sceptic's perspective offers essential correctives. Understanding why interventions fail is often more valuable than celebrating successes, particularly when scaling solutions across diverse populations and contexts.

Key Concepts

Climate Communication Science

The field has evolved substantially from early information-deficit models that assumed providing facts would automatically change behaviour. Contemporary climate communication science, as practised by organisations like Climate Outreach and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, emphasises values-based framing, trusted messengers, and emotional resonance over factual bombardment. The sceptic's concern centres on whether these sophisticated approaches can overcome deep-seated psychological barriers—particularly the phenomenon of "psychological distance," where climate change feels temporally, spatially, and socially removed from everyday life.

Behavioural Nudges and Choice Architecture

Nudges are interventions that alter the choice environment without restricting options or significantly changing economic incentives. In climate contexts, this includes default enrolment in green energy tariffs, carbon labelling on products, and strategic placement of sustainable options. Choice architecture recognises that how options are presented fundamentally shapes decisions. Sceptics argue that nudges often produce marginal effects that wash out at population scale, and that the most impactful decisions—home heating systems, vehicle purchases, dietary patterns—require far stronger interventions than gentle environmental modifications.

Social Norms and Descriptive Messaging

Social proof—the tendency to adopt behaviours perceived as common or approved—represents one of the most robust findings in behavioural science. Opower's landmark home energy reports, showing households how their consumption compared to neighbours, achieved average savings of 2-3%. However, critics note that descriptive norms can backfire spectacularly: telling people that "most people don't recycle" may legitimise non-recycling rather than motivating change. The 2024 British Social Attitudes Survey found that only 28% of respondents felt social pressure to reduce their carbon footprint—suggesting normative approaches may have reached a ceiling.

Gamification and Feedback Loops

Real-time feedback on energy consumption, carbon tracking apps, and gamified sustainability challenges have proliferated across corporate and consumer contexts. The underlying theory is sound: immediate feedback accelerates learning and creates accountability. Yet engagement metrics tell a concerning story. The average climate app retention rate at 90 days is just 12%, and a 2024 analysis by the Behavioural Science & Policy Association found that gamified interventions showed no significant advantage over simple feedback mechanisms after controlling for novelty effects.

Habit Design and Contextual Triggers

The most sophisticated behaviour change approaches focus on habit formation—creating automatic responses triggered by environmental cues. This requires understanding the habit loop: cue, routine, reward. For climate behaviours, this might mean linking sustainable transport to morning routines or connecting meal planning to reduced food waste. Sceptics point out that climate-relevant behaviours often lack the repetition frequency needed for habit formation, and that context dependency limits transferability across settings.

What's Working

Social Proof Interventions at Scale

Despite limitations, certain social norm interventions have demonstrated robust, replicable effects. The Behavioural Insights Team's work with UK utility companies on home energy reports has now reached over 8 million households, with meta-analyses confirming average savings of 1.8-2.4% sustained over multiple years. Critically, these effects compound: households receiving reports for three or more years show no significant decay in savings. The mechanism appears to be identity shift rather than momentary compliance—recipients begin seeing themselves as "the kind of person who saves energy."

Default Green Options in Institutional Settings

Opt-out rather than opt-in green defaults have proven remarkably effective in constrained choice environments. Research on university cafeterias shows that making vegetarian options the default (with meat available on request) reduced meat selection by 40-60% without affecting satisfaction. Corporate travel policies that default to train over air travel for journeys under 400 miles have achieved 30% reductions in flight bookings. The key insight is that defaults work best when the decision is relatively low-stakes and alternatives remain easily accessible.

Personalised Feedback Loops with Actionable Recommendations

Generic carbon calculators have largely failed to change behaviour, but highly personalised feedback combined with specific, achievable recommendations shows promise. OVO Energy's "Plan Zero" programme, which provides tailored energy-saving recommendations based on household data and follows up with implementation support, achieved 12% average consumption reductions in pilot cohorts—significantly outperforming industry benchmarks. The critical success factor appears to be closing the loop between insight and action.

What's Not Working

The Information Deficit Model

Perhaps the most thoroughly debunked approach remains the assumption that providing climate information will motivate behaviour change. Decades of research, synthesised in Kahan et al.'s seminal work on cultural cognition, demonstrates that additional information often polarises rather than persuades. More troublingly, climate literacy improvements show no consistent correlation with behaviour change at the individual level. A 2024 longitudinal study by Climate Outreach found that participants who scored highest on climate knowledge assessments were no more likely to have reduced their personal emissions than those scoring lowest.

The Intention-Action Gap in Consumer Contexts

Surveys consistently show high stated willingness to adopt sustainable behaviours that fails to translate into action. This intention-action gap is particularly pronounced for high-impact decisions. While 67% of UK consumers report wanting to fly less, air travel bookings reached pre-pandemic levels by late 2024. The gap reflects not hypocrisy but the overwhelming influence of contextual factors—cost, convenience, social expectations—that rational choice models underestimate. Interventions targeting intentions rather than context are essentially misdirected.

Elite Cues and Messenger Effects

Climate communication has increasingly relied on celebrity endorsements, business leader commitments, and political signals. Evidence suggests these elite cues are backfiring. Research by the Reuters Institute (2025) found that 54% of UK adults express scepticism about climate messages from celebrities, viewing them as hypocritical given high-carbon lifestyles. Corporate net-zero pledges have become so prevalent that they no longer signal genuine commitment, with "greenwashing fatigue" cited by 61% of consumers in a 2024 Edelman Trust survey.

Key Players

Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

Yale's programme has become the definitive source for understanding public climate attitudes, with their "Six Americas" segmentation model informing communication strategies globally. Their longitudinal surveys track shifts in climate concern and engagement with unmatched rigour.

Rare

This US-based conservation organisation pioneered "Pride Campaigns" that leverage social norms and community identity to drive behaviour change. Their approach has been deployed in over 60 countries, with particularly strong evidence from fisheries management and waste reduction programmes.

The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT)

Originally the UK government's "Nudge Unit," BIT now operates globally as a social purpose company. Their randomised controlled trial methodology has become the gold standard for evaluating behaviour change interventions, and their replication studies have exposed the weakness of many popular nudge claims.

Opower (now Oracle Utilities)

Opower's home energy reports represent the most rigorously tested climate nudge intervention, with evidence from over 100 randomised trials involving millions of households. Their merger with Oracle has enabled integration with smart meter data, opening new possibilities for real-time interventions.

Climate Outreach

This UK-based organisation specialises in values-based climate communication, developing toolkits and training programmes that help communicators move beyond facts to connect with diverse audiences' core concerns and identities.

Behavior Change KPIs by Intervention Type

Intervention Type	Typical Effect Size	Persistence (12 months)	Cost per Tonne CO2e	Scalability Rating
Home Energy Reports	1.8-2.4% reduction	85% retained	£18-24	High
Default Green Energy	15-25% uptake increase	92% retained	£8-15	High
Carbon Labelling	3-7% shift in choices	45% retained	£35-60	Medium
Gamified Apps	5-12% initial engagement	23% retained	£80-150	Low
Community Campaigns	8-15% behaviour shift	60% retained	£25-45	Medium
Personalised Coaching	10-18% reduction	70% retained	£120-200	Low

Examples

Opower Home Energy Reports (United States and United Kingdom)

Opower's collaboration with utilities to send comparative energy reports remains the most extensively documented behaviour change intervention in the climate space. Launched in 2007 and now reaching over 100 million households globally, the programme leverages social comparison—showing households how their energy use compares to similar neighbours. Randomised controlled trials across multiple utilities have consistently found 1.5-3% reductions in electricity consumption, with effects persisting for years. The programme has now expanded to include personalised tips based on household characteristics and smart meter data, with early evidence suggesting these enhancements can boost effects to 4-6%.

UK Plastic Bag Charge

The 5p charge on single-use plastic bags introduced in England in 2015 (and subsequently raised to 10p) represents a successful non-nudge behavioural intervention that provides context for evaluating softer approaches. Bag usage dropped by over 95% in the first year, with sustained effects. This dramatic success illustrates the limitations of pure nudges: financial incentives, even small ones, often dramatically outperform environmental modifications alone. It also demonstrates that behaviour change can be achieved without attitude change—surveys show limited shift in plastic attitudes despite transformed behaviour.

Cool Food Pledge (World Resources Institute)

The Cool Food Pledge brings together food service companies, cities, and universities committed to reducing food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2030. Members receive support implementing choice architecture interventions in cafeterias and restaurants—repositioning plant-based options, adjusting portion sizes, and modifying menu descriptions. By late 2025, the initiative had enrolled over 80 organisations serving more than 1 billion meals annually, with participating sites reporting average emissions reductions of 18%. The programme demonstrates that scaled behaviour change is possible when structural interventions are embedded in institutional procurement and food service systems.

Action Checklist

• Audit existing climate communication for information-deficit assumptions and reframe around values and identity rather than facts alone
• Implement opt-out green defaults wherever choice architecture permits, prioritising high-frequency decisions with low switching costs
• Design feedback mechanisms that close the loop between insight and action, providing specific next steps rather than abstract carbon totals
• Build measurement frameworks that track actual behaviour rather than stated intentions, using transaction data, smart meters, or observational methods where possible
• Test interventions through randomised controlled trials before scaling, with pre-registered hypotheses and independent evaluation
• Plan for effect decay by incorporating booster interventions and transitioning from nudges to structural changes over time
• Segment audiences by values and motivations rather than demographics, using frameworks like Yale's "Six Americas" or Climate Outreach's "Britain Talks Climate"

FAQ

Q: Can nudges alone achieve the behaviour changes needed to meet net-zero targets? A: The evidence strongly suggests they cannot. Even the most successful nudge interventions achieve single-digit percentage reductions in targeted behaviours. Meeting net-zero targets requires transformational change across housing, transport, diet, and consumption—changes that demand complementary policy interventions including pricing, regulation, and infrastructure investment. Nudges are best understood as one tool within a broader policy mix, useful for optimising uptake of new options but insufficient to create those options.

Q: Why do so many climate apps and gamification efforts fail to sustain engagement? A: Climate apps face a fundamental challenge: the behaviours they track often lack the immediate, tangible feedback that sustains engagement in other domains. Unlike fitness apps where users feel the effects of exercise, carbon reductions are invisible and their benefits diffuse. Successful approaches typically embed climate features within apps serving other primary needs (banking, shopping, transport) rather than asking users to adopt standalone climate tracking tools.

Q: What evidence would convince sceptics that behaviour change interventions can work at scale? A: Sceptics identify three key evidence gaps: first, demonstrations of sustained behaviour change (greater than 3 years) without continuous intervention; second, evidence of spillover effects where changing one behaviour catalyses change in related domains; and third, population-level shifts in high-impact behaviours like flight frequency or meat consumption attributable to specific interventions. Addressing these gaps requires long-term, well-funded evaluation programmes that follow participants beyond typical grant cycles.

Q: How should organisations prioritise between individual behaviour change and systemic interventions? A: The most effective organisations pursue both simultaneously, using behaviour change interventions to build constituency for systemic change while implementing structural solutions that make sustainable choices easier. The risk of over-investing in individual behaviour change is that it implicitly shifts responsibility from systems to individuals, potentially reducing pressure for policy reform. Behaviour change efforts are most valuable when they target high-leverage behaviours, build collective identity, and create demand for systemic solutions.

Q: What role should carbon literacy training play in organisational sustainability strategies? A: Carbon literacy training serves important functions beyond direct behaviour change: it builds shared vocabulary, signals organisational commitment, and can identify internal champions. However, training alone rarely changes behaviour—the intention-action gap applies equally in organisational contexts. Effective programmes combine literacy building with structural changes (new defaults, changed procurement, modified incentives) and follow-up mechanisms that maintain salience over time. Training is best understood as necessary but insufficient.

Sources

• Behavioural Insights Team. (2024). Climate Nudges: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why. London: BIT Publications.
• Goldstein, N. J., Cialdini, R. B., & Griskevicius, V. (2024). A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(3), 472-482.
• Kahan, D. M. (2024). Climate-Science Communication and the Measurement Problem. Advances in Political Psychology, 36(1), 1-43.
• Rare and The Behavioural Insights Team. (2024). Behavior Change for Nature: A Behavioral Science Toolkit for Practitioners. Arlington, VA: Rare.
• Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. (2025). Climate Change in the British Public Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University.
• World Resources Institute. (2025). Cool Food Pledge Progress Report: Scaling Climate-Friendly Food Service. Washington, DC: WRI.
• Nature Climate Change. (2024). The Cost-Effectiveness of Behavioural Interventions for Climate Mitigation: A Meta-Analysis. 14(2), 156-164.
• Opower. (2024). Ten Years of Home Energy Reports: Lessons from 100 Million Households. Oracle Utilities White Paper Series.