Green nudges: Applying behavioural economics to the fight against climate change

Abstract

The climate emergency requires prompt, wide-scale, all-encompassing action. Here, we discuss how insights from behavioural economics and decision-making have been applied to the fight against climate change in the form of ‘green nudges’, or behavioural interventions prompting individuals to make more environmentally friendly choices. We further consider how the potential positive impact of green nudges can be maximised and sketch out future steps in the field of green nudging based on a framework which considers the characteristics of targeted behaviours, such as scale of impact, susceptibility to intervention, and heterogeneity across the population.