About FAO News Multimedia Main topics Statistics Members Publications

Facility for Action for Climate Empowerment to Achieve Nationally Determined Contributions (FACE-NDC) 

Behavioral Science

Behavioral science hero

Behavioral science offers valuable insights into how people make decisions, form habits, and respond to incentives, making it a powerful tool in education, especially when addressing complex issues, such as climate change.

Behavioural insights bridge the gap between knowledge and action. In climate change education, this is especially important as it can result into the adoption and maintenance of environmentally friendly habits and sustainable behaviours, that can drive a green transition at society level. Incorporating behavioural insights in education can also make learning more engaging and address systemic barriers that prevent individuals from taking climate action. 

Behavioural approaches are integrated across the entire project, focusing on the measurement of behavioural drivers and outcomes, strengthening learning formats and materials, embedding behaviourally informed messages and methodologies throughout all levels of education, actively engaging community leaders and influencers and leveraging social norms.

The project will provide training to national institutions, NGOs, and CSOs on how behavioural science can help achieve climate change related objectives and on how to deliver effective behaviourally informed climate education.

The project is also creating a monitoring and evaluation system to assess the effects of climate education on behaviour change that will be applied across schools and non-formal education actors and monitor long-term outcomes of the learning and training activities.

Our behavioural focus to project implementation has three key elements:

  1. Behavioural outcomes: While awareness and knowledge are key steps to achieve climate change mitigation, our theory of change focuses on the behavioural outcomes that are directly linked to climate impacts.
  2. Behavioural insights: We apply the growing body of evidence from the Behavioural and Social sciences to propose interventions that work with real human beings.
  3.  Behavioural context: While behavioural sciences provide key insights on how to understand and influence human behaviours, specific barriers and enablers are local and context specific. We collect our own data on behavioural drivers for specific target groups