Wales made history in 2019 by becoming the first country in the world to declare a climate emergency.
In March 2022, the United Nations declared that all nations have now accepted that the climate emergency is real.
It’s the most significant challenge humanity has ever faced, and Wales has the chance to lead the way.
The Welsh Government has called for a ‘decade of action’ to tackle the climate crisis with our commitment in law to achieve Net Zero by 2050.
Our national Climate Action Wales campaign aims to encourage everyone to make changes that will help us achieve our target, using communications to help action behaviour change.
We developed an overarching brand to position Wales as a nation proud to work together to tackle climate change. This became the foundation of multiple integrated campaigns to drive greener behaviours for a greener Wales.
Behavioural Insights
We partnered with independent research partners and social science experts, including the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), Beaufort Research and ICARO to build and understand the ‘big picture’ of climate change in Wales. We considered relevant policy-levers and other influencing drivers (social, environmental, financial, tech), applying COM-B and EAST behavioural change models to define the role of the comms campaign to influence and drive positive-climate behaviour change.
We discovered that people are at various points on their journey towards a lower carbon lifestyle. Some actions are easier and more likely to be adopted than others, such as recycling or reducing food waste.
Armed with this insight we categorised and prioritised behaviours into ‘easy for most’, low or no cost actions (walking more and driving less, or wasting less food and recycling more) and ‘easy for some’ requiring more time or financial investment (installing solar panels or heat pumps, considering buying an electric vehicle).
Campaign Activation – What is Wales doing about climate change?
We learnt from research that most people feel powerless when it comes to climate change – unless the government and businesses do their bit to reduce carbon emissions, there is no point in them doing anything. So, it was important to raise awareness of climate actions by the Government and communities already happening across Wales, with a campaign answering the question ‘What is Wales doing about climate change?’.
The second phase of the campaign raises awareness of the range of everyday actions most can do now, and addresses the barrier that people believe they will not make a difference on their own. The campaign demonstrates the power of the collective: no one can do everything but everyone can do something, and together we can make a difference!
The TVC featured celebrities such as Matt Pritchard (Dirty Vegan) Amy Dowden (Strictly star) and the voiceover done by the brilliant Jason Mohammed (radio and tv presenter) and of course other Welsh talent.
The campaign encouraged people to find out more about what they can do by searching Climate Action Wales and visiting the campaign hub.
This campaign encourages people to take up actions such as walking to work or school, shopping second hand or recycling more and wasting less, demonstrating simple actions they can take to make an impact – and that these changes, even if they seem small, can make a difference.
Here we focus on the actions that we can all do now and emphasise the power of the collective.
We produced theme films which gave simple, everyday actions that we can all start with to reduced our impact on the planet, under the themes energy, food, travel and consumer choices.
Our Climate Action Wales case studies explore the stories of communities and organisations taking action on regional and local level.
