The Climate Advocacy Challenge is a research project aimed at identifying and testing short, online interventions to promote collective climate action in the United States. We invite you to join this effort by submitting an intervention proposal that could increase the outcomes of interest (i.e., signing petitions for climate-related issues, writing to representatives to support climate policies, encouraging registration for newsletters from climate advocacy groups, facilitating donations to organizations fighting for climate justice, motivating voters to support climate-friendly representatives, and inspiring participation in climate marches and related events). Contributors will have opportunities to receive public recognition and co-authorship in published research if their submitted intervention is selected as one of the finalists by our advisory board. The selected interventions will be tested in a large randomized controlled trial.

We are in a Planetary emergency threatening all life on Earth (UN’s IPCC, 2023).

For those of you who watched Oppenheimer, the warming we are experiencing now is equivalent to 7 Hiroshima atomic bombs being detonated every second (Cheng et al., 2021, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, covered in the Guardian).

Why does this matter? Every degree and fraction of a degree matters to the severity and frequency of natural disasters we're experiencing, which are projected to add food and water insecurity to an additional billion people by 2050, leaving up to 3 billion people outside living conditions by 2070 (Xu et al, 2020, PNAS).

Long term, the compounded stress global warming is creating is predicted to trigger the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history (Cebalos et al., 2015, ScienceAdvances).

The threshold for mass extinction is 5.2 degrees C of average global temperature change (Song et al., 2021, NatureComm). Today we're already at 1.2C average increase. At this stage 70% of Earth's wildlife that existed in 1970 has already disappeared (World Wildlife, 2022).

Without climate policy we're projected to reach 4.8 degrees Celsius of average global temperature increase by 2100 (although it could be sooner given positive feedback loops triggered by crossing Earth's tipping points; Armstrong McKay et al., 2022, Science).

However, with strong climate policies implemented very soon, we may have a chance of limiting Earth's warming to less dangerous levels. But we all need to act now for this path to be viable.

More info and data here.

The climate emergency is a collective problem that can only be addressed through collective solutions. This implies a combination of individual and systemic changes. Research estimates action at the individual and family level could account for 14% of the emissions reductions needed to reach net zero by 2050, whereas collective action could account for up to 64% of reductions in emissions needed.

So how can these changes be catalyzed? In a previous intervention tournament, we tested a toolbox of behavioral interventions that can stimulate individual-level climate awareness and action, such as beliefs, policy support, or tree planting efforts. In addition to identifying the most promising intervention for a given target audience, we reached 3 key insights from this research that are motivating the current project:

First, the interventions tested had very different effects on the different outcomes measured, suggesting that the top strategies we identified might not generalize to advocacy behavior, a critical component of climate mitigation.

Second, many interventions that successfully increased climate awareness, policy support, and information sharing, decreased individual contributions to a tree planting initiative. This backfire effect suggests that when being made aware of the extent of the consequences posed by this crisis, individual action might appear as futile, potentially increasing a sense of helplessness and demoralization. Yet even when the public intends to act proenvironmentally, only 20% of their behaviors are explained by their beliefs and intentions, the rest likely being a function of the systems and structures in which people operate. Accordingly, here we focus on promoting climate advocacy at the systemic level.

The third relevant insight was the extremely high global consensus (85%) on the urgency with which climate change should be addressed, especially through policies facilitating the transition to renewable energy. Despite this overwhelming consensus, however, only 20% of the global energy is being supplied by clean sources, and 80% by fossil fuels, pointing to a stark disconnect between public opinion and current policies. Indeed, under current policies, we are not on track to achieve the level of decarbonization needed to stay within safe planetary boundaries. Thus, to bridge this disconnect, here we aim to identify and test promising behavioral interventions that can motivate the public to advocate for systemic climate action.

Crowdsourcing has been found to improve the quality of scientific investigations by promoting ideation, inclusiveness, transparency, rigor, and reliability.

Indeed, in our prior climate intervention tournament, crowdsourcing the theories we tested led us to include less established interventions, such as “letter to future generation”, which ended up being one of the top interventions we identified.

A major barrier to translating scientific findings into policy and practice is the lack of direct empirical comparisons of theoretically driven interventions. Indeed, interventions typically differ in experimental protocols, outcome variables, samples, and operationalizations, hindering evaluations of their relative effectiveness. As a solution to this issue, researchers have proposed the megastudy approach. The megastudy is an experimental paradigm similar to a randomized controlled trial, but designed to evaluate the efficacy of many interventions on several outcome variables, in the same large-scale experiment. This provides a rigorous direct comparison of competing approaches to climate change mitigation.

We hope you will contribute your ideas for how to promote collective climate action in the United States. By participating, you can make a difference in helping to identify strategies to scale up climate advocacy. To acknowledge your efforts, everyone whose intervention is selected for testing by the Climate Advocacy Challenge will be offered authorship (listed as “Qualifiers”) on the primary publication resulting from the challenge.

You win the Climate Advocacy Challenge in 4 steps:

Step 1: You submit your idea (see the section “Where do I Submit My Intervention?”).

Step 2: Your idea is selected for testing by a Selection Committee (see the section “How Will My Intervention be Reviewed?”).

Step 3. You help the leadership team implement your idea into our study (e.g., work with us to design the stimuli, embed the intervention into the Qualtrics platform).

Step 4: Your intervention wins the Climate Advocacy Challenge by significantly increasing the target variables of the challenge.

You may submit your intervention through our online submission portal. Submissions are being accepted until March 1st, 2024.

If your intervention is selected for inclusion, you must commit to helping us implement it in the study.

Interventions must meet the following requirements:

• Ethical: The intervention must be approved by NYU’s Institutional Review Board.

• Online: The intervention must be deployable online.

• Short: The intervention must be no longer than 5 minutes.

• Scalable: The intervention must be able to handle up to 1,000 participants at the same time.

• Comprehensible: The intervention must be understandable to an English-speaking audience.

• Costless: The intervention must not pay participants in addition to what they are already being paid to participate in the study.

• Aligned: You cannot add additional measures for evaluating your intervention.

• Type: Interventions can feature videos, images, audio, or text.

These requirements are described in more detail below.

Requirement 1: Ethical

Your intervention must provide accurate and true information without exposing participants to unnecessary risks or harm:

• you may not deceive participants,

• you may not ask participants to state false beliefs (e.g., ask them to rate all feeling thermometers at 100),

• you may not present information to participants that is hateful, disturbing, or offensive,

• you may not ask participants to engage in hateful or disturbing behaviors.

Further, your intervention must obtain ethics approval by NYU's Institutional Review Board (IRB). If your intervention is selected, our team will obtain IRB approval for your intervention. If the IRB requires changes to your intervention, we will work with you to make those changes while maintaining as much consistency as possible to your original idea. You are encouraged to contact us via climateadvocacychallenge@gmail.com if you have concerns about ethics approval. We will not select interventions that attempt to game the system in some way, e.g., by instructing participants on how to reply to the DVs.

Requirement 2: Online

Your proposed intervention must occur online, but our platform allows for a diverse range of possibilities. We will accept interventions in the form of images, videos, and text which we can embed into a Qualtrics survey.

Requirement 3: Short

Participants should be able to complete your proposed intervention in 5 minutes or less. We may request that you shorten your intervention if pretesting indicates it will take longer than 5 minutes to complete your intervention.

Requirement 4: Functioning at Scale

A large number of participants must be able to simultaneously engage in your proposed intervention.

Requirement 5: Comprehensible

The intervention must be understood by an English-speaking audience because we will collect data within the USA.

Requirement 6: Costless

The intervention must not involve paying people in addition to what they are already being paid.

Requirement 7: Aligned

You must not administer additional measures after your intervention because this would interfere with estimating the effect of your intervention on the behaviors measured.

NOTE: If your intervention is selected for inclusion, you must commit to helping us implement it in the study.

Formal Check Review

Our staff team will review submitted interventions to check whether they satisfy the requirements for interventions. We will notify you if your intervention does not satisfy the requirements. You are welcome to contact us with questions about your intervention before you submit.

Selection Process

Our Selection Committee will select the most promising interventions to test.

The selection committee consists of an advisory and leadership board.

The Advisory Board

Members of the advisory board will provide expert reviews for the interventions. Members are experts from diverse backgrounds, including academics from different disciplines as well as practitioners. You can learn more about the members of the advisory board below on this webpage.

Each intervention will be reviewed by 1-3 experts. The experts will review based on the following criteria:

• What is the expected success of this intervention in promoting climate advocacy behavior, based on relevant prior empirical research?

• Reviewers will reveal if they know the identity of the proposers to avoid conflicts of interest.

The Leadership Board

The leadership board will make the final decision about which interventions qualify for the Promoting Climate Advocacy Challenge. The leadership board consists of the two principal investigators of the challenge:

• Madalina Vlasceanu (Assistant Professor of Psychology at NYU)

• Sara Constantino (Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Psychology at Northeastern University)

The selected interventions will be evaluated in a large-scale online experiment. Study participants will be recruited from a sample provider (see section “Who Are the Participants?”). Consent is required before participation in the study and those who fail basic attention checks will be excluded from the study. We will collect information about participant demographics, including gender, age, ethnicity, highest level of education, and partisan identity. Then, we will randomize each participant to experience a different intervention or a control group where they are not exposed to any intervention. Because participants are randomly assigned to experience various interventions, any subsequent differences in voting behavior relative to the control group can be interpreted as causal effects of the intervention (see section “How Will You Determine the Effect of My Intervention?”). The selected interventions will be evaluated in a large-scale online experiment. Study participants will be recruited from a sample provider (see section “Who Are the Participants?”). Consent is required before participation in the study and those who fail basic attention checks will be excluded from the study. We will collect information about participant demographics, including gender, age, ethnicity, highest level of education, and partisan identity. Then, we will randomize each participant to experience a different intervention or a control group where they are not exposed to any intervention. Because participants are randomly assigned to experience various interventions, any subsequent differences in advocacy behavior relative to the control group can be interpreted as causal effects of the intervention (see section “How Will You Determine the Effect of My Intervention?”).

Participants will be adults in the United States over the age of 18. Our sample will be a non-probability online sample of American residents that is representative on several major demographic benchmarks including political party, sex, age, ethnicity, education, and region within parties. These demographic benchmarks are based on the latest census data. Further, due to filtering based on attention checks, participants can be expected to be relatively attentive to intervention materials.

The effect of your intervention will be estimated by comparing advocacy behavior among those assigned to your intervention to the advocacy behavior of participants in the control condition, for each of the 8 advocacy behaviors listed above.

There are two important criteria for your intervention effect:

1. What is the size of the effect? We will report the regression coefficient as well as the Cohen’s d effect size.

2. Is the effect statistically significant? We will report p-values for one-sided tests. If this p-value is below .05, your effect is statistically significantly different from 0. This would suggest that it is very unlikely that the observed effect occurred just due to chance.

The Climate Advocacy Challenge is committed to open science principles such as openness and transparency. We want to maximize the scientific and public insights from the Climate Advocacy Challenge, and we want our procedures to be as transparent as possible for submitters and outside observers. We will preregister our analysis plan. Interventions, the anonymized data file, and our analysis scripts will be made public as soon as our first scientific paper on the Climate Advocacy Challenge is published.