Natural Change Project: WWF

Design, development and facilitation of the Natural Change Project for WWF.

The Natural Change Project was developed by WWF Scotland as a new and innovative response to the challenge of sustainability and to the growing evidence that current environmental campaigns are not resulting in the depth of behaviour change necessary to address this challenge.

The project drew together seven diverse individuals from the business, charitable, arts, public, health and education sectors in Scotland. All were selected on the basis of being excellent communicators who were influential in their sector, but not particularly environmentally aware.

The purpose of the project was to encourage this group to think deeply about sustainability, to communicate through their social and professional networks and to share the changes in their thoughts and attitudes more widely through the forum of internet blogging.

Problem

The world is changing very quickly now that challenges like climate change are recognised by governments around the world - and experienced on a daily basis by billions of people.

Previous ways of helping people adapt to our rapidly changing world no longer appear to be as effective as they were, even a few years ago. This project is about exploring new ways of creating the change necessary for a more sustainable world.

Research suggests that change can best be influenced in the long term through psychological approaches that work with people’s deeper personal values and identity. This was the starting point for the Natural Change Project.

Project

The approach was based on a series of residential workshops, which were held in natural environments and used ecopsychological activities. It was designed to engage the participants at the level of experience, values and identity, rather than the knowledge and evidence-based approaches commonly used to communicate about sustainability issues.

As an innovative communications and behaviour change project working with the psychology of sustainability, Natural Change was also intended to provide an insight into the process of how individuals change.

Benefits

Evidence from participants’ testimony and discussions during the workshops shows the Natural Change approach to have been extremely effective in stimulating deep thinking about sustainability and about their own lives.

The importance of a community of interest, providing support for personal journeys and critical reflection on sustainability was also clearly evident. This project has been extremely successful in causing the participants to communicate with their social and professional networks and a wider audience about these issues. What is remarkable is the honesty with which participants reported their, sometimes deeply personal, experience of the project, both in discussion and importantly in their blogs, touching others in a way that a mass-marketing campaign simply could not.

What has also been clearly emphasised by this project is that human beings are complex and their behaviour is shaped by many factors including the physical and social environments, relationships and the events they experience.

This project has demonstrated that there is no quick and simple method of changing behaviour. However, having been part of the Natural Change Project, all the participants have expressed a clear desire to take actions that go beyond the ‘quick and painless’ changes advocated by many environmental campaigns. It is also clear that the participants are now motivated to take practical action to realise this desire both in their personal and professional lives.

This project has created a replicable approach to building commitment to sustainability and it is likely to provide valuable approaches to behaviour change and environmental communications strategies in the future.

Visit the Natural Change web site at: www.naturalchange.org.uk and read the participants blogs directly.