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How Climate Action is Unlocked by Behavioral Tipping Points

Meaningful climate era change means meaningful lifestyle changes. But how do we encourage transformation that sticks?

Topic

Planetary health

Author

Blaine Merker

Reading time

5 minutes

Date

21.12.2023

Credit: Gehl.

In the spring of 2020, a new client, a COVID-testing company, came to Gehl with an urgent question for our design team: “How might we make testing more commonplace? Our answer illuminated a broader insight into the urban environment, human behavior, and their potential to drive collective action. Enter the concept of the behavioral tipping point — think of it as the moment when society collectively says, Follow me.

When we first took on this project, getting a COVID test was a decidedly weird experience, straight out of a zombie apocalypse movie. It was confusing and isolating, conducted in a stadium parking lot, requiring you to balance the test kit on your cars open window while reading a small-print instruction booklet. We realized that getting people to take the test wasnt just a problem of conveying clear instructions or public health information. We needed to de-weird the experience, make it obvious and social, and get enough people doing it in public to make it seem part of a new normal. To do this, we reconceived the test centers as hundreds of small walkup kiosks embedded in the familiar environments of main streets and neighborhoods.

For me, the project was a lesson in the power of the behavioral tipping point: when novel behavior crosses over and becomes common. Simply looking around at other people will tell you what to do. Our environment has the power to shape, at scale, the range of possible choices we can consider, especially under time constraints or when weighing complex information. Our friendly neighborhood kiosks reduced complexity and narrowed the options with a clear message: follow your neighbor and get tested.

As Head of Climate Action at Gehl, Ive been asking how we might harness this fusion of social and environmental factors to solve another crisis: our ecological one. How can urban design create behavioral tipping points that rapidly decarbonize cities?

Forget nudges to drive climate action

Cities are a powerful tool for synchronizing human decision-making and behavior patterns, so they have tremendous potential to scale up behavior change for climate action. When we think about the changes needed to reduce the 40% of emissions from transportation, or the 20% of total emissions from conditioned building space, we need to harness the power of behavioral tipping points that work in tandem with the built environment.

For example, bicycling and transit infrastructure to reduce individual car trips is a necessary, but insufficient, step in getting large numbers of people to bike or to take transit. Social infrastructure is also necessary. Friends and neighbors casually modeling a cycling commute doesnt just provide social proof: it reduces the cognitive load of making the same choice because the bike, the gear, or the route can be so easily copied. On my street, Ive watched solar panels appear across roofs and e-bikes pop up in garages, following a pattern of casual sidewalk conversations, tip trading, and, of course, keeping up with the Joneses. When infrastructure, incentives, and governance support this natural human tendency to spread our habits socially and move together, the result is an acceleration thats contagious and self-reinforcing.

The idea of nudging behaviors that are deeply entangled with urban systems is woefully inadequate to the challenge of creating these behavioral tipping points. Behavioral tipping points are built on numerous cultural shortcuts that distill complex decisions into common sense. So many details need to line up to make something as complex as a bike commute truly work, and we need both good design and a simultaneous tide of usage to ensure they do. Until then, new behaviors feel like swimming upstream and appear too brave, political, and unusual to scale.

Ecological tipping points

An alarming dimension of climate change is the unpredictable risk of crossing ecological tipping points that could catapult Earth into a radically different climate regime with the inability to reverse the process in our lifetimes. Such tipping points could include positive feedback loops started by the loss of sea ice and change of earths albedo, the inability of the oceans to absorb additional carbon, or the flipping of rainforests from carbon syncs to carbon emitters. These would be sudden accelerations of the clock, and they are directly related to our actions today.

Our generations challenge is to trigger the right behavioral tipping points before our environment reaches its own tipping points. While we cant predict the exact moment of an ecological tipping point, we can work to move cities to new behavioral tipping points. Weve done it before. Think about the physical transformation of cities when cars became commonplace or the rapid adoption of smartphones in the 21st century.

In the next 15 years, we need to scale a new set of urban behaviors: switching (or sticking) to plant-based foods, using no-emissions transportation centered around walking, transit, and cycling, and utilizing our built space more effectively. Our past shows us that these behavioral changes are possible in a short timeframe.

Immersive pockets of future

While incremental changes toward climate-positive behaviors are always important, they can end up stuck below a cultural ceiling if they dont pass the behavioral tipping point. A popular study showed that just 3.5% of the general population needs to accept a social change to bring the rest of society along — but this is the wrong metric to use for behaviors dampened by the inertia of the built environment. The threshold for urban behaviors needs to be more like 25-30% of the base to normalize them enough to encourage the rest of the population to participate. In the U.S., transit and cycling adoption seem to be stuck below the cultural ceiling whereas solar and electric vehicles appear to be passing the tipping point.

So how do we create the conditions for the additional behavioral tipping points we need? William Gibsons observation that the future is here, just not evenly distributed offers a clue. We need to focus our energy on creating a few model places where culture, infrastructure, and desire align to make new behaviors not just possible, but irresistibly easy and enjoyable.

Experiencing this kind of change is a powerful driver to replicate it, but we need a program of exchange and travel to these places by regular people and decision-makers. Starting from scratch is always tempting, especially for techno-optimists. Id instead offer that we should start with places where the future has already begun to take shape; these can be a more relevant template to the worlds eight billion people.

What do these pockets of the future look and feel like? If we had less than a decade to make a handful of them, which places are most strategic to transform? How might we elevate them in tourism, academia, and politics? And critically, how can we show that they don’t just solve problems but offer a better life for all?

This article was originally published by Blaine Merker on LinkedIn under the title: ‘How Behavioral Tipping Points Unlock Urban Climate Action.’