UNEP GEO-7 | Portfolio

UNEP GEO-7 x Behaviour Science

with Busara Center for Behavioral Economics and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

Background

UNEP produces a report called the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) every few years. This report is considered to be one of the most comprehensive and credible reports about global climate trends in the world. The report is usually presented at a UN environment assembly where member states get to take a copy of the report back to their own countries in order to implement the recommended climate change policies.

The problem is that most member states don’t actually read the report and most times, no policies are implemented. The main issues identified by UNEP are:

The report is very long and dense (written too academically by scientists)
The report is too “dooms day” (doesn’t provide solutions, just focuses on the problem)
The report gives global recommendations that are not customizable to different local cultures. For example, countries that are heavy meat consumers are not going to implement a policy to reduce meat consumption.

UNEP is currently starting the process of producing the 7th edition of the report, the GEO-7 report. This time, they want to make sure that member states and policymakers actually engage with it. Thus, UNEP hired Busara to apply behavioural science to engage the audience and ensure policy action. As the Behavioral Design Specialist on the Busara team, I designed the co-design workshop activities, co-facilitated the workshops and led the prototyping process.

Phase 1 - Problem Mapping

In order to plan for effective co-design workshops with UNEP stakeholders, we facilitated a pre-workshop where I designed a visualization exercise to better understand the problem and UNEP's big vision. For this visualization exercise, I chose to use the "Sailboat" exercise on a Google jamboard as shown in the image below:

I explained the exercise to the UNEP team and facilitated the initial part of the workshop. At first, I asked the team to individually add red sticky notes of the roadblocks/challenges that are preventing the achievement of the big vision. On the slide where the participants added the roadblocks, there was an anchor preventing the boat from reaching its destination or big vision.

After the first activity, I asked the UNEP team to imagine a gush of wind coming in that helps to push the boat forward. This gush of wind is ‘behaviour science’ and it converts the roadblocks/ challenges into solutions. They then added sticky notes at the top of the boat of solutions/enablers that behaviour science would help them create in order to reach the big-picture vision.

The sailboat exercise helped us to gain a deeper understanding of UNEP's goals as well as internal and external challenges that are preventing the GEO-7 from reaching its full impact. In the second part of the workshop, we built on the discussion to map the problem into 3 main areas:

1. Audience of the GEO reports

2. Authors of the GEO reports

3. Content of the GEO reports

Phase 2: Co-design Workshops

The co-design workshops were held in person with the UNEP team for 2 days. On Day 1, my colleagues presented a brief introduction to behaviour science for the first half of the workshop. During the second half, I facilitated a brainstorming session to further define the big problems we were trying to solve.

Day 1

To facilitate deeper discussions and more insights into the pre-defined problem areas, we split the groups into three: one group to focus on the audience, one group for authors and one group for content. I then led with a series of probing questions for each group in order to make the problem more tangible. The more tangible the problem or problem statement, the easier it is to design solutions for it.

Here are some example questions for each group:

Audience:

Have you noticed any characteristics/segmentation amongst actors in terms of the responses from different member states?
What challenges do economic tradeoffs bring up when pushing climate change policies to different audiences

Authors:

Why after all these years are authors still focused on presenting the problem if they have not seen actionable results from the audience? Could we think about example journeys of 2 or 3 authors and identify at what point they miss out on collaboration?

Content:

Are there examples of content that you have seen to be received better than others? Why?
From what cultural lens is content created?

This brainstorming session allowed us as a team to develop more specific cases for each group. The cases were used to facilitate the solution design process on the next day.

Day 2

The main goal for the day 2 workshop was to leave with some ideas that we could prototype and test to improve audience engagement and action for the GEO-7. We started with the UNEP team already split into the 3 groups: audience, authors and content.

To facilitate the design session, we first presented the EAST framework before jumping into ideation. The EAST framework has been proven to be very effective in designing for climate behaviour change. My role in this phase was to facilitate ideation in the Author group.

Based on the cases that were specified from the previous day, I started the facilitation by asking participants to map the micro-behaviours of the authors i.e. creating a storyboard of 3 different author personas. We then started the ideation process:

Rapid Ideation

The storyboards allowed us to identify the main gaps for which we wanted to design solutions. I then gave my team 10 minutes to brainstorm as many ideas as possible to solve the identified problems.

Cluster Ideas

After the rapid brainstorming, we found ourselves with too many ideas so we proceeded to cluster the ideas into groups or emerging themes.

Flesh out Ideas

Now, it was time to turn the thematic areas into well-defined interventions using the EAST framework. For example, one thematic area was behaviour science capacity building for authors so that they can frame their writing with the audience in mind. While this was a good intervention area, it wasn't specific enough so I asked the team probing questions like:

How might we make the training easily digestible?
How might we make authors who are well-established scientists interested in this training?
How might we increase collaboration in the training and writing process to encourage more diverse voices in the report?
How might we ensure retention of the training content?

After the ideation process, each group presented their ideas and the rest of the team voted on the best ideas based on impact and feasibility. At the end of day 2, we walked away with 3 final ideas to prototype; one from each group.

Phase 3: Prototyping

After the co-design workshops, the UNEP team had agreed on 3 main ideas to prototype. Each idea focused on increasing engagement with the GEO-7 for the authors, audience and within the content itself.

1. Winning Idea for the Audience: A "filter" feature to give the audience the ability to interact with the GEO-7 according to their needs and areas of interest using a “filter” feature

2. Winning Idea for the Authors: A pocket guide with a checklist to accompany the author's workshop on using behavior science to write for your audience.

3. Winning Idea for the Content: An adventure map to allow every reader to identify their own pathway to pro-environmental behavior.

Low-Fidelity Prototyping

Our team at Busara proceeded to develop low-fidelity prototypes of all 3 ideas. I led the design of the prototypes by drafting creative notes for our in-house graphic designer and ultimately, even designing one of the prototypes myself. We then presented the prototypes to the UNEP team for feedback, while highlighting the behavioral science tools applied in each prototype.

The Filter Feature

Our graphic designer created a mock up of the filter that would allow the audience to only access the information that they want and need, instead of pushing all climate information and leading to cognitive overload.

This tool is interactive, allowing the audience to filter the GEO-7 report according to their country, area of interest and comparison to other countries.

The Pocket Guide with Checklist

I designed the prototype for Author's physical pocket guide, including the writing checklist that is informed by behavioral science tools, such as framing.

Our graphic designer created a demo of the how the checklist would work if it was digitally embedded in the authors' writing software.

The Adventure Map

The starting point of the adventure map is a discovery map with options for the 5 environment assessment areas:

Air Policy
Biodiversity Policy
Ocean and Coastal Policy
Land and Soil Policy
Freshwater Policy

For the prototype, we showed an example of the solution pathway when a reader picks one of the areas e.g. if they pick “Biodiversity,” it leads to 3 new pathways:

Global Data
National Data
Best-Practices Library

These 3 options are buttons that the reader can click what information they want and so the adventure continues.

High Fidelity Prototyping

After presenting the low-fidelity prototypes to UNEP, they decided to proceed with all 3 interventions, starting with pocket guide + checklist that would be presented in 3 weeks to authors at their first meeting in Bangkok. Our team began developing high-fidelity version of the pocket guide. I designed the content structure and flow before our graphic designer put together the final document. Example pages can be seen below:

Reflection

Design facilitation is influenced by the participants

Participants in a design process come from different backgrounds and that also means that they have different ways of thinking. This was my first time facilitating a design process for scientists who are predominantly analytical thinkers. This meant that they would question the design process often and defaulted to highlighting problems rather than focusing on the solution. As the facilitator, I had to navigate these competing thought processes to encourage out-of-the-box thinking while still respecting the analytical mindset.

Big changes start with individuals

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges the world is facing today and for many people, even thinking about this problem can lead to overwhelm and inaction. What I learned during this project is that big problems get resolved by the decisions that individuals make. In this case, government leaders and policymakers are human beings and it's important to factor in the emotional and social motivators that would lead these individuals to take action, even if it seems trivial in the face of climate change.