Citizens Acting on Mitigation Pathways through Active Implementation of a Goal-setting Network

Project Information

CAMPAIGNers

Grant agreement ID: 101003815

DOI

10.3030/101003815

Project closed

EC signature date 10 May 2021

Start date 1 May 2021

End date 30 April 2024

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Climate action, Environment, Resource Efficiency and Raw Materials

Total cost

€ 4 999 670,00

EU contribution

€ 4 999 670,00

Coordinated by

ENERGIEINSTITUT AN DER JOHANNES KEPLER UNIVERSITAT LINZ VEREIN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CAMPAIGNers (Citizens Acting on Mitigation Pathways through Active Implementation of a Goal-setting Network)

Reporting period: 2022-11-01 to 2024-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The ambition of the European Union (EU) to become climate neutral by 2050 requires a fundamental and rapid change in the way we live. It requires citizens to take responsibility and make fundamental changes in policies and economies as well. Pathways to reach this goal must be fair, effective, inclusive and fully backed by citizens from all walks of life. CAMPAIGNers substantially contributes to this ambition by combining a high-level multidisciplinary research approach and an ambitious translocal data crowdsourcing. This is an unprecedented research approach for supporting cities and citizens to decarbonise their lifestyles, and by upscaling the insights from the local level to provide quantitative support for the national and international levels to advise the next NDCs in 2025 and the EU’s strategy to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement.
CAMPAIGNers merges a social innovation revolution seamlessly into the research objectives that help citizens to take real climate action and mitigate climate change by transforming their daily habits. While government action is important and supported at all levels through CAMPAIGNers activities, the desire for action shown in the climate protests demands a tool that allows every person to take meaningful climate action in their own lives, starting today. CAMPAIGNers aims to be the global climate action tool - seamlessly integrating social science research insights and policy support with grassroots action. Climate and energy science is critical to tackling climate change, but scientists and policymakers cannot solve the problem alone, citizens need to be empowered to take direct and meaningful actions.

CAMPAIGNers research agenda tackles the overarching project objective of providing the most profound and policy-ready knowledge base for supporting decarbonisation of citizens’ lifestyles from two angles:
I. the establishment of a ‘goal-setting network’ of at least 100,000 citizens across 5 continents, who are given opportunities to make specific and tailored changes to their lifestyles through #LifestyleChallenges, and
II. direct links between the goal-setting network, and associated research findings, and a continuous co-creation process with policy makers (in the partner cities/regions, from national authorities responsible for the next NDCs and at the EU level).

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first half of the project had two main objectives: 1. to development the smartphone app for engaging citizens, and 2. to start the creation of the goal-setting network of citizens. The work towards these main objectives involved several important activities. As the first of these activities, work package 1 mapped the conditions and characteristics of citizen populations targeted in each of CAMPAIGNers' Lighthouse City, such as social, cultural, and gender aspects and energy behaviors and identified the barriers to carbon-neutral lifestyles and the scope of policy action to prepare the ground for lifestyle-related interventions on the local scale. The results of this work build the ground for the subsequent work packages, in particular 2,3,4, as well as work package 7. In work package 2, the smartphone for engaging citizens was developed and is continually improved to better match the users expectations. The app was released in worldwide during the reporting period, and users across many European and non-European countries started using it. Work package 3 provided multidisciplinary insights in ways of motivating citizens. and utilized the knowledge to create the first round of #LifestyleChallenges, which were implemented in the app shortly after. WP 4 developed a marketing campaign for recruiting and engaging citizens of the goal-setting network. This involved a intensive coordination work together with the project's Lighthouse Cities, to utilize their existing marketing channels as good as possible in the campaign. The campaign started in September in most partner countries, yet it will be boosted at the beginning of 2023 when the time is most promising for an uptake of the app according to marketing specialists. Work packages 5 is responsible to utilize the data about the engagement of citizens with the app. In the reporting period, the database for collecting the user data was specified and set up, followed by the definition of a research plan for the utilization of the data, and the methods for providing the public with at-a-glance statistics about the activities in the app were specified. Work package 6 and work package 7 are both at an early stage by the end of reporting period 1, and have been used for preparatory work to enable a comprehensive achievement of their objectives in the second half of the project. WP 8 has the objective to disseminate the project among stakeholders and policy makers. To have the highest possible impact, most related activities were planned to take place in the second half of the project, when the app is fully functional and available to citizens around the planet. WP 9 manages the project execution.

The project largely achieved its objectives for the first half of the project, with delays in some of the activities due to a high complexity of certain tasks than expected. However, by the end of reporting period 1, the project is about aligned to the original project plan, and the team is prepared to achieve all of the project's objectives as originally planned.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The CAMPAIGNers approach pushes low-carbon lifestyles and policy research and associated methods beyond the state-of-the-art in several aspects:
● Produce generalizable and quantitative social science outputs that overcome deficiencies in past social science lifestyles research by using a broad base of empirical evidence compiled through observing real-world interactions with the goal-setting network.
● Develop a data generation and analysis system for social science lifestyles research. The ICT measurement instrument generates real-life, experimental data on climate-related behaviors and allows for automated analysis protocols across geographies and climate actions.
● Test various information and inventive treatments (e.g. collective efficacy framing, co-benefits) on the propensity to try out a new behaviour across a broad geographic and socio-cultural scope that includes robust, within-group randomization methods.
● Test the effects of socio-cultural, macro-economic and environmental contexts on the ability and willingness of citizens to pursue low-carbon lifestyles.
● Provide achievable lifestyle transformation pathways to climate neutrality in response to different local, national, and EU policy options and strategies with unprecedented precision.
● Participating citizens will not only provide unprecedented realistic data for research, but at the same time learn about the (co-)benefits of decarbonising their lifestyles, kicking-off the transformation of citizen lifestyles leading to measurable reductions in energy consumption and CO2 emissions.
● Achieve diversity in researched lifestyles and behaviours, in the socio-cultural-economic backgrounds and gender identities of participating citizens.
● Improve leading Integrated Assessment Modelling tools by integrating behavioural aspects from empirical data, representing transformative change towards climate-friendly lifestyles and providing novel insights about the impacts of lifestyle changes on GHG emission reduction objectives and other SDGs within and beyond the EU.

Screenshot 4 of the CAMPAIGNers app

Screenshot 5 of the CAMPAIGNers app

Screenshot 3 of the CAMPAIGNers app

Screenshot 1 of the CAMPAIGNers app

Screenshot 2 of the CAMPAIGNers app