Our past and current efforts in facing environmental challenges have tended to rely on providing incentives or disincentives, and raising awareness about the dire consequences of our behaviors. Nevertheless, if you are tasked with developing a strategy to curb the harmful attitudes and behaviors towards the environment, your strategy requires a holistic approach to creating solutions as you want to develop interventions that last and make a difference.

In addition to the mentioned tools, this course will shed a light on how our cognitive biases, emotions and decision-making environments all impact our behaviors and choices. The main goal is to offer an introductory guide which can help you to identify the behavioral barriers and solutions to overcoming the biggest environmental threats. you’ll come away from this course with:

1.            a clearer understanding that climate change requires behaviorally-informed solutions and

2.            the capacity to build a practical framework for developing, implementing and evaluating behavior change interventions

3.            an understanding of key principles underpinning maintenance of behaviour change

Part 1 will introduce participants to foundational neuroscience principles. This will help us explore some key findings regarding human behavior and decision making from a cognitive neuroscience perspective and discuss them with regard to unsustainable decision making and behavior.

Part 2 will explore the experimental endeavors of a number of national governments, NGOs and global institutions in attempting to re-imagine policy making in an era where the cognitive, emotional, neurobiological and behavioural processes of the citizen are seen as the new target points of strategic policy strategy. This day culminates in an exercise where participants apply the knowledge and skills developed in the session to a campaign of interest.