How ‘choice architecture’ can help fight climate change

It’s an important piece of the overall fight against climate change, says Mindy Hernandez, who leads the World Resources Institute’s Living Lab for Equitable Climate Action, a program that applies behavioral research to climate change. “We’ve taken a supply-driven approach to climate change for 50 years,” she says. “And as the IPCC report makes clear, that approach isn’t getting us where we need to be, and we are running out of time. Supply is just one arm—the behavioral side is the other arm we need to push past the crisis. It’s not one or other. It’s both. The behavioral lens should complement the policy changes and tech side.”

She compares it to what has happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Developing vaccines—the technology—was critical,” she says. “But [the] NIH [National Institutes of Health], CDC [Centers for Disease Control], and others invested a tiny fraction of that time, money, and effort in figuring out how to get people to take those vaccines. When the outgoing director of the NIH was recently asked what the NIH could have done differently in their fight against COVID, he said: ‘Maybe we underinvested in behavioral research.’ We should not make the same mistake in the climate crisis.”

The IPCC report estimates that “comprehensive demand-side strategies” across all sectors could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% to 70% globally by 2050. The report suggests multiple types of interventions, from nudging consumers to eat more sustainably or buy more repairable, durable products, to redesigning infrastructure to help people shift from cars to biking or public transit.