The context: To date, progress in decarbonising the UK economy has largely been achieved by addressing supply-side emissions and in ways which do not disrupt consumers’ lifestyles, such as transitioning from coal-fired to gas-fired power stations. The path ahead will be more difficult. According to the Climate Change Committee, a hefty 62% of the necessary emissions cuts from now to Net Zero will rely on changes in behaviour: 53% require ‘technology adoption behaviours’ like heat pumps and electric vehicles, while 9% relate to ‘lifestyle changes’, including reducing meat and dairy consumption, limiting car use, and curbing the growth of aviation. Many people face real obstacles to these changes – such as cost, convenience, motivation, uncertainty, and lack of awareness – that make these choices difficult. Additionally, even the measures that the government can implement more independently, such as decarbonising the energy grid and building the required infrastructure, still require public support as well as careful coordination of a range of public and private sector actors. Achieving these goals may require bold policy action to drive the necessary behavioural and infrastructural changes. Without careful management, there is a risk that these issues could become highly politicised or dominated by negative narratives, potentially undermining the public mandate for action.
To that end, we (The Behavioural Insights Team; BIT) were commissioned by the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and Nesta to better understand public attitudes to Net Zero policies, the factors that underpin support or opposition, and what can done in the way policies are designed to increase popularity.
What did we do? We first reviewed literature in May 2024 to draw out principles that have been shown to increase support for policies, such as whether the public perceive them as fair and effective (see key finding 1). We then conducted further research to shortlist a set of Net Zero issues where policy action is likely to be required, but may be controversial. For each of these areas, we picked a specific policy that could be proposed to address this issue. Table 1 below shows these policy issues in column 1, and the specific policy to address the issue, in its ‘standard form’, in column 2. From these, and drawing on our identified principles of support, we developed a set of variants of each of these policies to observe how support for these policies vary (columns 3-6). Then, between May and June 2024, we conducted five focus groups with seven participants each from the UK public to explore support for these policies. Finally, we ran an online experiment with a nationally general population sample of 3,008 UK participants to further test and understand the extent of support.
