CAMPAIGNers

Climate change is the challenge of our time and the direct participation of citizens is a significant approach to the solution. The project CAMPAIGNers aims to make low-carbon lifestyles a key part of the solution by identifying the potential for lifestyle change, and the associated barriers and enablers, across 5 continents and 14 major cities with over 20 million inhabitants. Feasible GHG mitigation pathways will be developed that incorporate the empirically validated lifestyle changes and applied to the main integrated modelling tools used in the EU to provide robust insights into the system-level impacts of large-scale lifestyle change. CAMPAIGNers builds on previous consortium-led projects that have significantly improved the understanding of societal structures and interventions that promote lifestyle change, and identified limitations in the existing evidence base. In particular, current research on lifestyle change is either limited to narrow, specific contexts or groups, or deals with hypothetical behaviours that most citizens have no real-world experience of. CAMPAIGNers’ groundbreaking approach overcomes these shortcomings by implementing a ‘goal-setting network’ where over 100,000 citizens receive and create challenges to try out tailored adaptations to their daily routines via an engaging app. Their responses to these challenges, associated treatments and short questionnaires will provide unprecedented data on behavioural processes, (local) barriers to change and motivators, allowing for empirically based scientific support to cities in designing policies to promote low-carbon lifestyles. Together with local, national and EU policy makers, the findings will be analysed in terms of the ‘right level to act’ and policy-ready recommendations will be derived.