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Psychologists draw from social psychology research to encourage more environmentally friendly behaviors.

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The 10 Campaigns Helping Save Our Planet Most | Greatist

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The 10 Campaigns Helping Save Our Planet Most | Greatist

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Mother Earth has needs, too. These ten campaigns support, protect, and nurture the environment all in their own way - from keeping beaches and marine life clean to monitoring polar ice caps. Learn about (and get involved with!) the campaigns doing their part to take care of the planet.

1. Charity: Water Photo by Esther Havens

Though charity: water sets out to help people rather than the environment itself, they are giving new life to one of the planet's natural resources. Unsafe water (and lack of basic sanitation) kills more people every year than all forms of violence combined, including war. This charity aims to significantly reduce disease in the developing world by making one of life's most basic needs - clean water - more accessible. The organization chooses locations in need around the world to build water and sanitation services, considerably reducing the amount of time and effort spent collecting water (that wasn't even safe in the first place). The best part about this charity? 100 percent of public donations go to funding projects. (In other words, your donation goes right to where it's needed - not to help cover charity: water's operating costs.)

Want to help fund a water project? Donate here.

This campaign is a cinch to participate in: For 30 days (and hopefully for longer than that), campaigners pledge to ditch disposable plastic water bottles in favor of regular old tap water (served up in reusable bottles or plain ol' glasses). Not only is tap water more cost-efficient, but one person going disposable-free for a month saves an average of 18 bottles from entering landfills. Purchasing your own reusable bottle and tossing it in a work or gym bag takes no time and - best of all - it's free to fill up. Pledging to ditch disposable doesn't have to stop after 30 days. Make it a habit and stay hydrated the smart way.

Ready to ditch disposable? Pledge here.

3. No Farms No Food Photo: Farmland.org

Whether we like it or not, our food systems have drastically changed - for better and for worse. While smaller-scale farms provide healthy local food throughout the U.S., they are rapidly disappearing. The message of No Farms No Food is simple: Supporting local food is crucial. This campaign uses donations to protect local farmland, educate communities about the importance of farms, and push legislation to support local food. Eating locally grown, seasonal produce can actually be a much better choice for the environment and your health too. Most of the time, choosing produce grown at local farms - general considered to be within a 100-mile radius - can be the greener (and more nutritious) choice since fruits and veggies don't need to be shipped across the country.

Like to get involved? Sign the petition to protect local farms and food here.

4. Think.Eat.Save Photo: Think.Eat.Save

Ever tossed a bunch of bananas because they ripened too fast or dumped a package of expired chicken in the trash? Think.Eat.Save is on a mission to help people become more aware of food waste. Using initiatives already set in place, including the Save Food initiative and Feeding the 5000, plus tons of tips to cut down on food waste, this campaign is about changing people's habits to spark lifelong change. At the end of the day, wasted food means wasted water, energy, and land, plus loads of greenhouse gas emissions from both the production and disposal of food. (Read more: 29 Smart and Easy Tips to Reduce Food Waste)

Ready to think, eat, and save? Take action here.

5. IceBridge Photo by Ludovic Brucker

This six-year NASA mission may not be as simple as switching to tap water or cutting down food waste, but it's just as important. IceBridge, the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice, will soon provide us the most accurate measure of change over time. The data collected during the mission (which will be completed in 2016) helps scientists keep track of annual changes in thickness of sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets. Rather then prevent further environmental damage like some of the other campaigns on this list, IceBridge is out to provide concrete data about what to expect from global climate change for years to come.

Rather than sound like a "rinse, reuse, recycle" broken record, I Want to Be urges people to give their trash new life. In partnership with Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council, this campaign turns things like water bottles and aluminum cans into new, inventive, and useful objects like park benches, bikes, and siding for sports stadiums. With short videos that put a theatrical spin on recycling, I Want to Be helps us rethink our garbage and how to get rid of it the best way possible.

Time to spread the word? Become a recycling expert here.

From Nairobi to New York City, this London-born organization aims to strengthen communities, beautify cities, and improve urban environments worldwide by developing beautiful, utilitarian urban green spaces. Trees not only bring nature to metropolitan areas, they help clean the air by absorbing pollutants, provide oxygen, save water, and grow food (amongst plenty of other benefits). Support Trees for Cities by participating in a fundraising event, or get out there and join in on a planting day.

Interested in volunteering? Register here.

From cleaning up marine litter and sewage pollution, to increasing awareness about toxic chemicals and climate change, UK-based Surfers Against Sewage aims to improve the quality of the world's oceans and beaches. While educating the public about conserving and protecting the marine environment, SAS works to change government policy and industry practices for the better, too. This award-winning charity - with separate campaigns to combat marine litter, improve water quality, and educate about climate change (for starters) - is taking care of beaches one cigarette butt at a time.

Ready to clean up dirty beaches? Get involved here.

Solar Schools installs solar electricity panels on school roofs across the nation. While the primary goal of the campaign is to harness solar power, which emits fewer greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels, Solar Schools also aims to educate students and parents about how solar panels work. Each installation puts environmental consciousness in kids' minds early on. The campaign also provides teacher training and workshops about sustainable energy. Most schools also receive live data so students can check out how much electricity their panels create.

Check out the Solar Schools here.

Slow Food isn't just a campaign; it's a way of life. Putting a priority on sustainability by focusing on local food, Slow Food is a global organization (spanning more than 160 countries) that teaches people how to make smart choices in food selection, celebrates food traditions and taking time to enjoy eating, and tackles tough topics like genetically modified organisms and animal welfare. This campaign does a whole lot to protect local food through education events at schools and hospitals and with fairs and tours that showcase sustainable agriculture and artisan foods.

Want to get involved? Choose to slow down here.

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The 10 Campaigns Helping Save Our Planet Most

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Mother Earth has needs, too. These ten campaigns support, protect, and nurture the environment all in their own way - from keeping beaches and marine life clean to monitoring polar ice caps. Learn about (and get involved with!) the campaigns doing their part to take care of the planet. 1.

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The Science Behind Turning Out Environmental | Campaigns & Elections

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The Science Behind Turning Out Environmental | Campaigns & Elections

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Apr 26, 2016

By Nathaniel Stinnett

To subscribe to the monthly C&E email newsletter and event announcements click here.

Gone are the days of targeting broad demographic groups who might swing an election. Now, data analytics and predictive modeling allow us to identify individual voters according to which candidates those voters are likely to support and which issues they're likely to prioritize.

And in 2016, perhaps no group of issue-voters could be more impactful (or more misunderstood) than environmentalists.
Environmental voters are the great value proposition of 2016.
First, unlike with other political priorities (like economic growth or education policy), there are often clear differences in how candidates (and ballot questions) address environmental issues.

Second, since environmental voters often have such clear choices on their ballots, campaigns and advocacy groups don't need to persuade environmental voters to vote a certain way; instead, they can just rely on the high likelihood that environmental voters will make the "right" choice. As a result, campaigns can simply focus on turning these voters out. This is a big deal because voter turnout campaigns are much less expensive than voter persuasion campaigns (and they're certainly cheaper than having to do both voter turnout and voter persuasion).

Finally, contrary to popular thought, there is a huge pool of non-voting environmentalists from which to draw. In fact, at the Environmental Voter Project, we have identified 15.78 million super-environmentalists who rarely or never vote.

Taken together, this means that there is an enormous number of already-persuaded (but non-voting) environmentalists who can be turned out at a relatively low cost. Of course, the devil is in the details, and there are plenty of misconceptions about how best to identify and turn out environmental voters.
Identifying environmentalists.
When identifying environmentalists, there's no substitute for a good predictive model built from a data-rich voter file. Working with Clarity Campaign Labs, the Environmental Voter Project has tested and re-tested our own environmental voter models and found them to be extraordinarily accurate. Other national environmental groups have also built very accurate predictive models.

The problem comes when advocacy groups and campaigns choose to trust their guts - rather than predictive models or other data - because we've found that conventional wisdom about environmentalists is almost always wrong.

Perhaps you've heard some of these before: environmentalists are all Millennials (wrong), they're all white people (wrong again); they all vote already (really wrong).

In our September, 2015 predictive model of voters in Massachusetts, we sought to identify registered voters who prioritize climate change and other environmental issues over all other political issues. Although (as with all models) no single data point is necessarily predictive on its own, we found that almost every piece of conventional wisdom was either unhelpful or dead wrong.

For instance, being between the ages of 55-59 had much more "predictive power" when identifying environmentalists than if a voter was in their 20s or 30s. Similarly, we didn't find any ethnic variables that could predict a voter's likelihood of prioritizing environmental issues - and recent polling reveals that if any ethnic group prioritizes environmental issues, it's Latino voters.

Finally, we found that huge numbers of environmentalists usually don't vote. In Massachusetts, for example, we found 277,250 registered super-environmentalists who didn't vote in the 2014 gubernatorial election - a number that represents almost 13 percent of overall voter turnout in that election.

The data points that did hold predictive power were often just as surprising and even a bit odd. For instance, where consumer data revealed that a voter enjoys watching basketball or autosports, we saw a strong correlation to that voter also caring about environmental issues. We also found strong correlations with voters who purchase wireless products or support gun control measures.

This doesn't mean that environmental groups should now target NASCAR dads who buy iPhones. It just means that no one should assume that they know what an environmentalist looks like. And if you can't afford a good predictive model, you might be turning out the "wrong" voters if you just blindly accept conventional wisdom about who is and isn't an environmentalist.
Getting environmentalists to vote.
Once you've properly identified your environmental voters, it is then just as risky to accept conventional wisdom about how to get them to vote.

Reams of recent GOTV studies have shown that politically-agnostic " expressive-choice " messaging is often much more effective than trying to convince someone to vote based on an issue they care about. Nevertheless, the temptation for environmental groups to "talk to environmentalists about the environment" is so great that many advocacy groups continually fall prey to this conventional wisdom in their GOTV campaigns.

Until recently, most campaigns assumed that voting was a rational decision made by self-interested individuals after a cost-benefit analysis. Essentially, we assumed that someone would vote if they expected the benefits of voting to outweigh its costs. This is often referred to as "rational choice theory."

The problem is that voting isn't a rational decision made after a cost-benefit analysis. In fact, as political scientists love to point out, there's a higher likelihood of someone being hit by a car on the way to their polling place than there is of that person's vote affecting the outcome of an election.

A revealing proof point of this concept are the GOTV studies showing that if you tell voters that turnout will be low, which, of course, means that their vote has a higher likelihood of making a difference, not only does it not increase voter turnout, but it may even depress turnout, particularly with infrequent voters.

None of this is terribly new information, but the problem is that we often toss these findings out the window when trying to mobilize issue-voters. We blindly assume that talking to environmentalists about the environment must be the best way to get them to vote. But we're wrong - we're mistakenly assuming that we can get someone to vote by explaining the beneficial outcomes of voting. That doesn't work.

Instead, if you view voting as a way that people express themselves, it often reveals far more effective GOTV messages. Plenty of sophisticated campaigns have now embraced social pressure (reminding people that their voting records are public information), peer pressure (stressing that voter turnout is expected to be high), or appealing to the desire to follow through on one's commitments (reminding people of their previous pledges to vote). Some of these techniques are proven to increase turnout by as much as 8 percent.

At our firm, where we focus only on turning out non-voting environmentalists, we've also found that this type of GOTV messaging has a profound effect on voter turnout. Just this past March, we found that a combination of voter pledges and social pressure mail increased turnout by 5.1 percent in a randomized control trial of non-voting environmentalists - and this outcome included a large number of voters who never received our treatments because canvassers couldn't reach them. Alternatively, we've found that stressing the environmental importance of an upcoming election has absolutely no impact on turnout whatsoever.

These results are important only in that they reveal that environmentalists are no different than any other voters. The best way to turn out environmentalists is not to talk about the environment, but rather to use the issue-agnostic messaging that we already know works extraordinarily well with all voters.

For a community that often celebrates science, we in the environmental movement have been slow to accept it into our GOTV campaigns. But we can no longer afford to trust our guts - we need to let big data and behavioral science find our people and lead them to the polls.
Nathaniel Stinnett is the founder & CEO of the Environmental Voter Project, a non-partisan nonprofit using cutting-edge technology to identify non-voting environmentalists, register them, and get them to vote.

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The Science Behind Turning Out Environmental Voters

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Apr 26, 2016 By Nathaniel Stinnett To subscribe to the monthly C&E email newsletter and event announcements click here. Gone are the days of targeting broad demographic groups who might swing an election. Now, data analytics and predictive modeling allow us to identify individual voters according to which candidates those voters are likely to support and which issues they're likely to prioritize.

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Changing minds to prevent climate change

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Changing minds to prevent climate change

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A long-anticipated APA report on climate change is urging psychologists to give policymakers their behavioral tools to head off a climate change catastrophe.

During APA's Annual Convention, the association released the report from the Task Force on the Interface between Psychology and Global Climate Change, which outlines ways psychology can help people adopt more environmentally friendly behaviors as well as ways policymakers can publicize such practices and, whenever appropriate, weave behavioral research into environmental laws and regulations to make them more effective.

"The quickest way to reduce our energy consumption is clearly behavioral," says Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), a clinical psychologist who is championing the addition of social and behavioral science research to environmental legislation on Capitol Hill. "It's going to take us a while to get to cellulosic ethanol or fuel cells or whatever...but we can change behavior tomorrow."

The task force was initiated by APA's Council of Representatives, chaired by Pennsylvania State University psychologist Janet Swim, PhD, and its members were appointed by 2008-09 APA President Alan Kazdin, PhD. The group explored decades of psychological research into changing behaviors at the individual, population and policy levels. Some of its findings are:

The well-researched psychological principle that people tend to discount future gains and losses plays a large part in their unwillingness to take climate change seriously. "Many think of climate change risks...as both uncertain and also as being mostly in the future and geographically distant, all factors that lead people to discount them," the report states.

Psychosocial factors, such as patterns of consumption and population growth, play a big part in climate change. Psychologists are well-versed in the motivations behind these factors, making them ideal agents for changing these behaviors.

Many people are uneducated about climate change, confused about the facts or don't believe their actions can make a difference. Furthermore, those who do try to act to protect the environment don't always do so effectively.

It's not clear exactly how climate change will affect people psychologically, but it's likely to be devastating. According to the report, "[h]eat, extreme weather events, and increased competition for scarce environmental resources...will affect interpersonal and intergroup behavior."

The task force suggests that information about environmental sustainability be infused into psychological curriculum so that budding psychologists are equipped with the right tools to encourage environmentally friendly behavior. Clinicians should prepare for potential therapy issues, such as increased stress and anxiety that may result from climate change. APA should encourage research and applied science into environmental issues through awards and grants.

To help the public and policymakers, the task force recommended creating and distributing easy-to-understand informational materials that explain what psychologists know about how human behavior influences climate change and how humans can cope with and adapt to a changed environment. It also suggested creating a database of expert psychologists willing to consult for organizations and talk to the media on behavioral topics related to the environment. Finally, the task force encouraged psychologists to lobby local, state and federal government officials to take psychology's expertise into account when legislating environmental issues.

Kazdin believes that whether the task force succeeds or not depends on both APA's commitment to the report's recommendations and policymakers' willingness to embrace behavioral research.

"The question for APA governance [is], 'Do we really want to make a difference, or do we just want to say that we are relevant?'" Kazdin says. If APA doesn't follow through on its commitment, he adds, it would be like "having several great plays, but not having any players to actually get in the end zone."

But Kazdin is cautiously optimistic. The right players do seem to be in place to make a difference, he said.

Baird admits that even with strong science on his side, it's often an uphill battle to convince both the public and other policymakers that psychology should have a role to play in environmental issues. "We're getting quite an extraordinary backlash from people who, on the one hand, have said that psychology has nothing to contribute because everybody knows what they're supposed to do anyway," Baird says, "and then turn right around and have said that it's tantamount to mind control propaganda."

Psychologists can counteract that negativity by streamlining their suggestions and providing the hard numbers and evidence to back them up, he says. "This is really an opportune time for our association to communicate the value of what we know and do to the public and policymakers," he says. "But it has to be ruthlessly practical. We have to put forth things that are real with real numbers and real consequences."

And the sooner the better. We can't afford to wait for technology to bail us out, Baird says. The leading causes behind most of the major crises facing the United States-the economy, energy, health care and national security-are behavioral in nature, he said, and so are the remedies.

The task force's full report and set of policy recommendations are available online.

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task force on the interface between psychology and global climate change

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Changing minds to prevent climate change

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A long-anticipated APA report on climate change is urging psychologists to give policymakers their behavioral tools to head off a climate change catastrophe.

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Best Environmental Ads - Powerful Environmental Ads

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Best Environmental Ads - Powerful Environmental Ads

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These Images from Various Ad Campaigns Around the Globe Remind Us That the Planet Is in Peril.

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Opower: using smiley faces and peer pressure to save the planet.

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Opower: using smiley faces and peer pressure to save the planet.

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Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters

How can I convince you to conserve energy? I could remind you that using less power saves money and helps the environment, but you won't listen. Studies have proven that appeals to cost and conservation have no impact on people's energy consumption.

But what if I told you everyone in your neighborhood is reducing their energy consumption-except you? Would competition and a little fear of judgment convince you to switch off your air conditioner?

That's the theory driving Opower, a company that's helped millions of people lower their energy bills. Rather than sell or produce energy, it makes software-software that is changing the way Americans consume energy by setting them in a contest against their neighbors. In the process, Opower has discovered that when it comes to energy efficiency, conscientiousness doesn't inspire nearly as much change as competition (and a little judgment).

At the heart of Opower's software is the behavioral nudge-a gentle push toward the right decision. Perhaps the most infamous such example was implemented in the Amsterdam airport, where painting flies on urinals reduced spillage by 80 percent. (If you give a man a target, he can't help but aim.) In the same vein, Google's cafeteria is brimming with nudges toward a healthy diet: Healthy foods are coded in green, guilty pleasures in red; plate sizes are smaller-than-average; and the most indulgent desserts are banished to a far corner of the room. Similarly inspired fitness apps encourage you to out-exercise your friends. But using behavioral psychology to encourage energy efficiency has been more difficult, in part because while almost everyone wants to save energy (for both environmental and financial reasons), the resolve to do so wavers once the thermostat climbs. Turning intent into action requires a special kind of push.

Robert B. Cialdini, a well-regarded researcher and author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, began thinking about that in 2001. When a summer heat wave in California led to blackouts, he decided to investigate why the state seemed unable to prevent the grid-frying overuse. The big problem: While 90 percent of Californians ranked energy conservation as "very" or "extremely" important, and 98 percent claimed to "try to conserve energy," virtually no one was taking the necessary steps in their own homes.

To learn why, Cialdini and his team placed door hangers on thousands of homes near San Diego. Three of these hangers provided standard rationales for energy efficiency: saving money, protecting the environment, and helping future generations. A fourth merely listed strategies for saving energy. These hangers each had only a negligible effect on energy consumption.

But another hanger tried a different tack, reporting that a certain percentage of the neighbors were using fans instead of A/C. It was, in essence, altruistic peer pressure-and it worked. The houses that received that hanger showed a 6 percent average drop in consumption, massive in the world of energy efficiency (and more than three times as much as the other homes targeted for messaging).

That study buttresses Opower's strategy. Since its founding in 2007, the company has been teaming with energy producers to monitor customers' energy consumption. Opower processes information from companies, then produces detailed energy consumption reports sent to each household, like when they use the most energy and what appliances are most wasteful. The reports are mailed to homes on paper-a seemingly counterintuitive medium for a company whose mission is cutting waste. Yet Opower has discovered that virtually no one will go out of their way to read an online energy report or take the time to parse its often-dense details. That's because energy use is considered "low interest" information: Unless your electricity is out, you probably don't care about it that much. Similarly, Opower requires customers to opt out of these reports rather than opt in. According to Ogi Kavazovic, vice president of product and strategy, an opt-in system will result in 1 percent of customers opting in, while an opt-out system results in 1 percent of customers opting out.

In addition to giving you feedback on your energy use, the report includes a bar graph that compares your own energy consumption with your community's average and that of your community's most energy efficient households-all of which can be helpful. But the real key is one last box: a grade assessing your energy consumption. You receive two smiley faces for great conservation (that is, using less than 80 percent of what your neighbors do), one for good (using less than most of your neighbors do), none for bad (using more than most of your neighbors). As soon as customers recived their first reports and saw the smiley face box, they began increasing their energy efficiency.

Without that box, "people will just regress back to the mean" once they've beat their neighbors, says Kavazovic. "We have to tell customers we approve of them." It's a strategy called "injunctive messaging," and it's the core of the company's own behavioral nudge Opower also used to include a frowny face for wasteful consumers, but they received too many complaints. "People would call us and yell, 'Who do you think you are?' " says Kavazovic. "Now your punishment is no smiley face." And that appears to be punishment enough. The habit acquired through nudges, moreover, can last a lifetime: According to W. David Stahlman, a professor of learning and behavior at UCLA, though "trying to change behavior is difficult, trying to maintain already-learned behavior is pretty easy." Once "people train themselves to behave in a certain manner"-saving energy, avoiding desserts-"their behavior has become habitual." That means that even if Opower's customers lose interest in competition, they'll likely retain the energy efficiency habits they acquired when striving for the prized smiley.

Regardless of the psychology behind them, Opower's strategies have been incontrovertibly successful: By the end of February, the company has already helped customers save a total of more than $220,135,000 on energy bills, 3,170,710,000 pounds of CO2 emissions, and 2,066,950,000 kilowatt hours. A family of four saves about 2.5 percent more energy on average once their utility company teams with Opower, a figure that stays fairly steady across income levels. Without appealing to money or the environment, Opower is helping to save both.

So, how can I convince you to save energy? By telling you I'm already saving more than you are.

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How Smiley Faces and Peer Pressure Can Make You Save Energy

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How can I convince you to conserve energy? I could remind you that using less power saves money and helps the environment, but you won't listen. Studies have proven that appeals to cost and conservation have no impact on people's energy consumption. But what if I told you everyone in your neighborhood is reducing their energy consumption-except you?

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Methow Headwaters – Methow Headwaters Campaign

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Methow Headwaters – Methow Headwaters Campaign

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SUPPORTERS, A huge thank you to all of you who have stood up, come out and signed on to support Methow Headwaters. Thanks to you, we were able to show overwhelming support to the USFS for protecting these incredible lands and waters. Thank you!
SIGN OUR PETITION

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SUPPORTERS, A huge thank you to all of you who have stood up, come out and signed on to support Methow Headwaters. Thanks to you, we were able to show overwhelming support to the USFS for protecting these incredible lands and waters. Thank you! SIGN OUR PETITION