Climate Change and Behavioural Insights Project
Hampshire County Council declared a Climate Emergency in June 2019 and has been working with its partners to develop a strategy and action plan to achieve carbon reduction targets. This includes measures to encourage and enable changes in behaviour across the community with policy interventions based on robust scientific evidence and behavioural insight. The County Council’s Insight and Engagement Unit undertook a project to deliver initial insight research to inform the approach to behaviour change.
As part of this project, the University of Southampton has been collaborating with HCC to allow them to measure and model carbon impacts of behaviour change as well as enriching the insight into who is willing or able to take action.
Aleksandra Nazeraj, a PhD candidate from the Faculty of Social Sciences, has worked extensively to model and calculate carbon for 23 separate climate change actions. This involved navigating national statistics, establishing a carbon calculator and many novel calculations to adapt these sources to the needs of the project.
The contribution of the University has allowed the County Council to greatly increase the quality and scope of its work within a tight budget and has led to enhanced decision making.
In particular it informed the HCC’s Climate Change and Behavioural Insights report, available here and HCC’s Climate Change Strategy available here.
Hampshire County Council intend to use this work further in a number of ways:
- Prioritising climate actions they wish to communicate about or commit funds toward based on likelihood of success in cutting carbon;
- Targeting of segments of the population to maximise citizen behaviour change
- Ensuring HCC communicates the right messages;
- Create a framework to ensure that people make changes that have the best impact;
- Clarify for people what impact their behaviour can make.