BI and climate change: consumer climate behaviours and risk mitigation

- Welcome to the final session in BETA’s BI Connect 2023 Virtual Series Exploring leading work across behavioural insights industry. My name is Laura Bennetts-Kneebone. I'm an advisor at BETA in a climate change string of work.

Thank you very much for joining us today. Before I introduce everyone on behalf of all the presenters here today, I would like to acknowledge the Yawuru people as traditional custodians of Rubibi, the town of Broome in Western Australia, where I live. I acknowledge and respect the continuing culture and the contribution they make to the life of this town in the Kimberley. I would also like to acknowledge and welcome other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may be attending today's event, but those who are joining us for the first time welcome.

As a very brief introduction BETA sits within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Many of us are Canberra based, but quite a few of the team work remotely from other locations across Australia. We work across government to apply behavioural science to a range of policies and programs. Our mission is to improve the lives of Australians by generating and applying evidence from the behavioural and social sciences to find solutions to complex policy problems.

A core part of our mission involves building capability. This event is one of many initiatives we've done to share knowledge and build awareness of behavioural insights. You'll see the role BI can have been supporting the development of government services, policies and programs. If you're feeling inspired by today's presentations, visit our website where you can see further information about our projects. There are also various tools and resources that can help you learn more about by applying behavioural insights to a project of your own.

Today's session focuses on behavioural insights and climate change, Exploring consumers, climate behaviours and using BI for risk mitigation. We will be hearing from Professor Ben Newell from the University of New South Wales, Professor Michael J. Hiscox from Harvard University. And Saul Wodak from the Behavioural Insights Team Australia. We have three presentations today. Approximately 25 minutes will be dedicated to each. We will have time for questions but will save them for the end of the session for a panel style, Q and A.

You're welcome to submit your questions through the talks via the Q&A function. Our first speaker is Saul Wodak from Behavioural Insights Team Australia. The title of his presentation is How to Build a Net Zero Society using Behavioural Insights to decarbonise home, energy, transport, food and material consumption. Saul is an experienced qualitative researcher and behavioural science Specialist he is the environmental lead at the Behavioural Insights Team in the Sydney office. He also has experience across a range of policy spaces, including health and welfare, education, employment and gender equality. Before BIT, Saul worked in the Behaviour Change team at Hill and Knowlton Strategies, so as Master's in behaviour change from UCL and a Bachelor with honours in Psychology. Thank you Saul

- Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. I'll just work out how to share my screen is that I be give me a thumbs up if that's working. Yep. Okay. Fantastic. So thanks, Laura. Yeah. My name is Saul. I work for the Sydney Office of the Behavioural Insights Team and I'm super excited to be here today and talk about this topic of how we can build a net zero society.

So I'd also like to do a quick acknowledgement of the country in which I'm presenting on today. For me, that's the Gadigal land of the Eora Nation and I'll pay respects to elders past and present.

Just a quick background of who we are, the Behavioural Insights Team. We are a social impact independent and global research consultancy. We exist in the overlap between government, academia and consulting, and our mission is to work with businesses and governments to deliver pro-environmental and pro-social outcomes.

So we originally were born inside the UK government as one of the world's first governmental organisations using behavioural insights. But we've now spun out into eight different offices around the world and there are three really three key pillars to our methodology. The first is that we have a behaviourally informed practice, so we're driven to understand how humans really think and behave in real world contexts. The second is we prioritise evidence based approaches and are always striving to build more evidence in the field of behavioural science. And thirdly, the way we do this is we use a range of measurement and evaluation approaches to be sure that the solutions we think are going to work are actually having that desired effect. Before this, we recommend that they're scaled up to further use. So today what I'm going to do, the topic is about building a net zero society.

So what I'm what, what I'm actually reporting on is I'm giving an overview of a report released earlier this year in January. The report maps out a blueprint for how behavioural science can help societies reach net zero.

So for full disclosure, disclosure, I didn't personally work on this report. It was mostly done by our team in the UK and is therefore mostly based on UK industry and citizen data. But I do think that a lot of the broad principles to the Australian context, but I do think it's also might be a fruitful area for discussion later on about where the Australian context might differ up to the UK. But along the way I'll delve into several Australian case studies, several of which I did work on, are to bring these principles of the report to life in the Australian context.

Now in general, the theme and the tone of today's talk is going to be more hopeful. But I'd like to avoid a doom spiral. But I'm sure most of us are very aware of how dire things can seem in the climate space. These are just two articles that came to my attention last week. But the main takeaway here is that we are not on track to reach decarbonisation targets, neither in Australia nor globally.

So our starting point is probably something we can all agree on, is that we all need to improve our efforts and strategies to deliver net zero, and we also need to dramatically increase our urgency on this and move much faster than we have been. So an interesting starting point is what's been stopping us. We can say that there is an overwhelming level of public support for action in many countries around the world. So this data on the slide is Australia. That's from Ipsos Climate Change report 2023. But the data was almost identical. In the UK data we collected 80% of concerned about climate change. Two thirds of Australians think we should be doing more and 60% think we should be a global leader.

But unfortunately only we know that public support for change is not going to get us to net zero on its own. Success requires a whole range of new behaviours. So in order to decarbonise the entire economy, we're going to have to impact everybody's day to day lives almost every time, according to the UK's Committee on Climate Change, 62% of the required emission cuts to reach net zero will depend on some kind of behaviour change. This includes changes to the way we commute, what we eat, how we power our homes, where we go on, how we travel, our fundamental relationship with the material world and with energy. And in terms of where the 62% comes from, 9% comes from people actually having to stop or reduce carbon intensive behaviours. So that might be eating less meat or flying less and then 53% are adoption behaviours.

So this means shifting to cleaner technologies, things like electric cars or heat pumps and then the remaining 38% are supply side changes. So that might be decarbonising electricity generation. So what we can see from this data is that there's quite a challenge ahead for all of us who work in this field to work out how to enable all of this behaviour change that needs to happen.

And what I'd like to do now is show you a little video that brings to life this challenge that we're all facing. If it plays Huh. Just give it a minute, maybe I'll try it one more time.

[Upbeat music] Yeah, I think it's very important, not just for me, but for future generations. Yes. Yes. I would like. Yes, definitely. I think it should be important for everybody. Yes, certainly as yet. Yes, it's super important. my gosh. Yes, very much so. Absolutely. Very important. This Yeah, I mean, we do try in terms of transport a lot as much as we can. Recycling, you know, the clothes which have been trying to recycle clothes. Yeah, I do think I do try, but obviously I don't forget this and I feel there's more things you can always do. I try to think about it as much as possible, but they're just sort of small changes that we can make ourselves. Like I know. There. Remembering to keep a clock of back in our bag when we go shopping or be mindful about recycling. So I guess maybe in a.

Okay can put us out of our misery that there's clearly some internet problems, probably this extreme weather event that we're all experiencing.

But what this video does is it brings to life several challenges, several findings, sorry, that came out of a huge survey that we conducted with over 8000 UK adults. And what we found is firstly, that the public not only want net zero, but they're also really keen to play their part. So around 90% of UK adults said they wanted to make more sustainable choices in their lives. Except they also said that they faced massive barriers like high costs, inconvenience or lack of know how. And they finally they, they said that they wanted and needed more action and government and support from government and businesses to help enable these behaviours to help make them easier to perform.

Now to unpack this a bit more, we also asked people in this survey what kind of actions they were willing to take. And the good news is we found that people are willing to make a wide range of very specific behaviours in their lives to make it to commit to making those changes, even on unpopular actions like changing their diet or flying less. However, there was a big issue that we identified here. You might see a downward trend from left to right. What this is, is that people are willing to take the easy, low impact options or those that have obvious co-benefits compared to high cost actions. So what we can say here is that a willingness to do something does not always mean a willingness to pay more or accept compromise, enjoyment or sacrifice convenience.

So this really sets us up for our question today What can we do about this? How can we develop policy and business practices which encourage society to act on the widespread concern for the environment that is already out there and what role can behavioural science play? So a good starting point is a good model or theory about how behaviour actually happens. We know that individuals act on preferences, knowledge, values, habits and biases, but they also do this within environments that have a large influence on choices.

So these could be factors like pricing, convenience or social norms and pressures. And then these factors often exist due to a system of wider factors that things like commercial incentives or regulations or cultural norms. And if you think about all these different factors that influence our choices on our actions, you can broadly put them into three different buckets, which we explore in our report. Through the analogy of a river, you have the micro downstream individual factors, you have the meso midstream choice environment factors, and then you have the macro upstream systemic factors. And so in the report we've explained this by describing different types of interventions that kind of operate at these three separate conceptual levels. So first, we can target individuals downstream by asking them to make changes in their own lives, typically through communications and public engagement. For example, we might encourage people to repair broken electronics before they replace them. We can also target people midstream in their choice environment by making green choices easier, more affordable, more available, or more normal. For example, we might reduce the costs of repairs by making them tax free. Finally, we can target the deeper functioning of the system upstream.

So in the report, we mostly focus on things like incentives and fixing behavioural market failures. And often that's about designing markets so that businesses do better when they're consumers to choose greener options, which unfortunately is rarely the case. So for the remainder of the presentation, I'd like to take kind of zoom in and take a look at what all this looks like in practice, noting that I can't do the full report justice. It's over 120 pages long. There's 20 big policy recommendations and dozens of ideas for businesses and others to consider. And it's makes recommendations across five sectors.

But what I'd like to do is highlight four key principles and how they can be realised in policy. The first principle is an emphasis on having a foundation of information and public engagement. So I'm sure that as many behavioural scientists on the line today and we all know the old behavioural science trope, that information provision on its own is generally a fairly weak driver of behaviour change, but it can often be a necessary step. Many of the required changes that people need to make are going to depend on some degree of active engagement and therefore on their knowledge and awareness. The problem at the moment is that while many people are willing to make changes that currently misdirecting their efforts, so our survey data found that most people are very wrong about the impacts of their behaviour. In general, we tend to overestimate the value of small, more salient or more familiar actions like turning off lights or recycling. And so we kind of saw this in the video I showed earlier with a focus on making those small more easily attainable changes in people's lives, while at the same time we underestimate the impact of big actions like dietary change or switching to an electric vehicle. And one of the reasons for this is that it can be very difficult for consumers to reliably identify the greener option in the market in the absence of good information, greenwashing often takes over and then businesses have less of an incentive to up their game. So at this point, I'd like to segue to an Australian case study of a trial which we ran on the harms of greenwashing. I did personally work on this trial and yeah, its a. It's a really I believe a colleague of mine, Robby, maybe has presented it in this forum previously, but I'm going to cover it just briefly in the context of this report. So for those who don't know what greenwashing is, it's it's when organisations or governments mislead consumers about environmental practices. However, in practice, greenwashing claims are often more nuanced than outright lies or falsehoods. So the most common offence is when a company maybe highlights a token green action, like an energy retrofit in a corporate office, but they fail to put it into context with the company's wider environmental footprint.

So to further explore this issue, our Australian team ran an online experiment to test some of the more subtle greenwashing strategies that we'd seen in a market scan of energy ads. And we also tested if there were any ways to protect consumers against greenwashing. We did this by Randomising 2352 Australian participants into three groups based on promising educational interventions that we'd seen in the misinformation, academic literature, two groups for, say, the different educational interventions, and one was the control group that received no intervention. And then participants saw grey most ads of fictional energy companies. And in terms of what we found, we found, unfortunately evidence that greenwashing is highly effective. So over half of consumers in the control condition believed that the Greenwash claims were a reliable source of information about a company's eco practices, and they also believed that the fabricated greenwash energy companies that we made up had stronger green credentials in the in the green most ads and even worse and quite surprising. I've personally found this quite a shocking finding was that those who personally identified as most concerned about the environment, which I'm sure as most people on this call, were more highly susceptible to greenwashing. The better news is that both the educational interventions had a modest, highly significant impact protecting consumers from the harms of the greenwash claims.

So in the report, we provide recommendations for how to build a foundation of information and public engagement. Are a few of these I'll just quickly touch on In terms of upstream actions. We could tighten regulations on advertising and greenwashing in addition to cracking down on all forms of greenwashing As we're starting to see from the ACCC, we could follow other countries lead by restricting advertising of high emitting sectors and even explore the benefits of banning fossil fuel ads entirely. In terms of midstream actions, we could create a simple system of ecolabel across key product sectors like food, clothing and super products and this will help engage consumers choose between the green options.

I'd like to just pause there. Just ask Laura what time are my aiming to finish my because I didn't take a note of my start time and I want to make sure I make time for everything else.

Yeah, sure. You're scheduled until 35 minutes past the hour.

Wonderful. Okay, great. Make sure I finish by then.

So the second principle in that I'd like to talk about today is making green choices easier to make. So currently, many necessary green habits are too expensive, too inconvenient, and too unappealing. That there are a range of ways we can make green actions easier. For example, we could remove frictions. We could increase their availability of of good substitutes, and we could also make the green option the default.

And this last one, the defaults is what I want to zoom in on today, because as a behavioural scientist myself and I'm sure many other practitioners on the line today know and recognise from the literature that they are an incredibly powerful tool in the behavioural science toolkit for making green choices easier while still protecting consumer agency. So the way it defaults work is as most humans tend to stick with a status quo option or preselected option, because for a number of reasons it's low effort, it's often interpreted as safe or normal or a recommended option. And this is particularly the case with pensions in the UK or superannuation in Australia. So in the UK, in the pension system, 90% of people who are automatically enrolled in a pension product will stay in that fund that they're first assigned to. So you can see what a powerful effect this status quo or default effect is.

So what we did is we ran an online experiment where 160 pension holders were given a scenario where they received an email from HR Asking if they'd like to switch from their default current pension fund. They were randomised into a control group and three treatment groups. So the first treatment was a red flag condition which pointed out the funds that were most harmful for the planet.

The second was a star ratings treatment group, which gave funds a star rating for their environmental impact between one and five. And the third was a green default is where the default fund is the environmental fund. And what we found is that both the star rating and the green defaults were effective at encouraging more people to choose or stick with the environmental fund. And the green people in particular had the largest impact, increasing the number of people who chose the green pension option by 47.7%.

So our report makes a number of policy recommendations for how to make green choices easier and unfortunately, in the interest of time, I think I'm going to run out of time for this today. But I will encourage everyone to take a look at the report for more details on this. The third principle I'll talk to today is making green options the cheaper choice in the marketplace. So we believe that one of the best ways to create and prepare for tipping points is to make the green option cheaper than the dirty option. So this could often be achieved through well-calibrated incentives or carbon prices. For example, despite coal being cheaper than gas, it is twice as carbon intensive.

So increases in the UK carbon price between 2013 and 2016 helped to create a critical transition point at which gas became cheaper than coal, leading to extremely rapid decommissioning of coal plants. So the power of price is demonstrated in a trial that we ran in the UK to test different policy options to boost the uptake of heat pumps.

The aim of the trial was to optimise uptake of a £5,000 government subsidy for heat pumps. The online trial involved 8000 UK respondents making 24,000 hypothetical choices between a heat pump and a traditional boiler. In these choice sets, we varied things like the upfront costs, the running costs, the installation time and an offer of cheap finance for the heat pump. And I'd like to draw out three interesting data points here.

The first is that price really matters. So halving the cost of the heat pump led to a ten percentage point increase in uptake. The second is that relatively small changes to the running costs. So that's slightly cheaper to run than a boiler made a modest impact as well. Seven percentage point increase. Then what we say is when both these are combined, when you have low upfront costs, but also a past that critical point where it's cheaper to run, you had a 31 percentage point increase, which is significantly more than the sum of individual impacts.

So what we can see here that a £5,000 subsidy upfront is good, but it still isn't super attractive when it's more expensive to run than the boiler. But getting the cost down to 5000, £5,000 upfront becomes more acceptable if it's also going to save you money on running costs. So it's all about finding that sweet spot of a willingness to invest that upfront, but it also eventually paying for itself in the long run. So in the report we detail a range of policy recommendations for how to make green options the cheaper option. I won't go through these in great detail, but what's interesting is the large public support that we saw for a whole range of public spending and market measures that would incentivise greener consumer behaviours or disincentivise polluting behaviours. And even when they affected popular consumer behaviours like flying and driving or eating. So options that garnered high public support included imposing a tax on people who fly a lot, reducing taxes on electric vehicles and increasing them on internal combustion engine options and heavily subsidising public transport. And the final principle I'll talk to today is an upstream intervention and this is all about aligning market incentives.

So the aim of this approach is to align the incentives that businesses face so that they are motivated to create these mid-stream choice environments in which green consumption flourishes. So perhaps the poster child of success for upstream incentives is the sugar levy on drinks in the UK. This was a policy which introduced scaling levels of taxation depending on the amount of sugar in a beverage. So for example, there was no tax on soft drinks that contain less than five grams of sugar per 100 milk, and that was ramped up to $0.18 per litre on soft drinks containing between five grams and eight rounds of sugar. So the magic of this policy lies in the fact that it was designed explicitly to encourage manufacturers to reformulate their drinks to contain less sugar, thus avoiding the tax.

And this had two benefits. Firstly, generally, consumers weren't forced to pay higher prices overall, and secondly, it created choice environments in which all consumers consume less sugar. But by default, even those who would not have been influenced by a more conventional syntax that we often see on things like tobacco and alcohol. So this is a very elegant approach to behaviour change because it no longer feels like behaviour change. It's taking a lot of that intentional action out of it. And that's the whole point.

So the report details a range of upstream policy recommendations which I encourage everyone to have a look at. I'll just give you a quick snapshot in my remaining few minutes of a few of my favourites so we could introduce a supplier facing carbon tax to incentivise the reformulation of carbon of high carbon foods.

So this would mirror the UK sugar levy that I just presented and it would look like a supplier facing tax based on the carbon intensity proportion of meat and dairy products. And what this would do is it would incentivise a range of more sustainable production methods and product innovation. So I'll draw out a few interesting insights here.

The first is that our survey data showed that public support for a supplier facing carbon tax on meat, for example, was 23% higher than a consumer facing tax on meat, which is really interesting. Our second thing is that this was actually the topic of my master's thesis in which I ran a study in which I found that a carbon tax on food was more effective at shifting food choices, but it was relatively unpopular. While a subsidy on greener foods was both more popular and more effective at shifting food choices. Anyone wants to know it out on this topic later, please drop me a line. I find it really, really fascinating and interesting. And another really interesting thing here is that the framing of it is really important.

So framing it as a carbon levy on food was was much more popular than a meat tax. But the important thing here is it's not just about clever framing. Design really needs to work to incentivise suppliers to decarbonise rather than to penalise consumers with higher prices. The second way to align upstream and downstream market incentives is to mandate warm rent property listings. So currently landlords don't have much incentive to make rental properties more energy efficient as tenants are the ones footing the energy bill. So warm rent property listings would require property listings to include estimated energy bills. And what that would do is it would shift the focus towards the energy efficiency of rental properties and would do this by making these costs more visible and more salient, therefore incentivising landlords to invest in energy saving retrofits. And finally, we would advocate for a comprehensive labelling system that clearly indicates the environmental impacts of products and services. So I mentioned this earlier. So on the one level, this provides consumers with transparent and easily understand information and it would help them to make great choices. But the way it would change these upstream market incentives was at the same time it goes up to incentivise businesses to adopt more sustainable practices as their environmental performance then becomes a differentiator in the marketplace. So just a quick conclusion of everything we've heard today. Delivering net zero depends on a large amount of behaviour change, 62% by some estimations. The good news is that there is widespread public support and willingness to act, but unfortunately at the moment a lot of barriers get in the way. Things like convenience, cost and accessibility. Citizens are looking for leadership from businesses and government to make green choices easier. And there's three different levels on which we can do this. We can do this on the downstream individual choices, the midstream choice environments or the upstream systemic factors. And we heard today that public engagement and communications is a critical foundation, but it's almost certainly not going to be enough. We must make green choices more easy and more affordable, and we can do that directly with businesses. But the scale or impact, we should also look at how we design markets so that businesses flourish when the green option is adopted and with one minute to spare, I will share a link QR code to the report and that's my email address. Please download the report, Have a look and please get in contact if you have any questions or things you would like to chat about. Thank you very much. I'll stop sharing.

-Thank you so much. So. So that brings us to the end of Saul’s session. You're welcome to submit questions and we will ask them at the end session When we speak to the panellists, we'll now moves on to our next speaker, Professor Michael Hiscox from Harvard University. The title of his presentation is Climate Action as Behavioural Change. Michael is a professor in the Department of Government at Harvard University. He's the founding director of the Sustainability Transparency Accountability Research Lab, the Star lab and a faculty member of the Behavioural Insights Group at Harvard Centre for Public Leadership. He's also a faculty associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs and the Harvard University Centre for the Environment. In addition to this, while on leave from Harvard between 2015 and 2017, Professor Hiscox was the founding director of BETA. He continues to serve as an advisor to BETA. Michael will present recent in-progress studies that test interventions based upon these behavioural insights that help individuals better align their actions with their intentions to help address the climate crisis. Welcome, Michael. We're looking forward to your presentation of t.

-Terrific. Thank you, Laura, for that great introduction and thanks to everyone for being here. Thanks to all for a great initial presentation. That's going to be hard to follow that I'll see if I can find my slides. Hopefully everyone can see that. Okay, terrific. Thanks, Laura.

Okay, so I thought I would I'm not sure if I can match some of the timing, so I might have to adlib a little bit here, but yeah, I thought I would give a presentation about some of the research that we're doing at the at the STAR lab and in particular some of the research that we're doing with Australian companies in the Australian context. So I'm actually especially relevant. I can repeat some of the, some of the evidence that Saul gave. You know, we've been seeing this for for a few years now in surveys here in the US, but surveys in Australia and Europe that at least 80% of the public surveyed say that they now see climate change as a major threat and in a high number or higher proportion say that they want to do something themselves, they want to reduce their own impact and their carbon footprint. And so it's all said that sound that, you know, gives us a lot of hope, but also a lot of kind of food for thought here in terms of the potential for encouraging and facilitating behavioural change. We have a lot of people who have good intentions and and our kind of challenge is to help them match their actions to their good intentions. So I'll cover this too. But you know, the traditional list among environmental experts about the kinds of behavioural change that individuals or households can make that would have the biggest impact if done at scale, usually looks something like this with the adoption of rooftop solar systems to essentially take you off the grid as much as possible so that you're generating your own, your own power at home, Other home renovations we mentioned heat pumps as the other big ones are about solar systems. It's really heat pumps as the most efficient way to the heat and cool home. And and then, you know, things like insulation or electrifying the home, getting rid of gas and oil, for example, big ones as well. After that, usually people talk about electric vehicles, especially at the fleet level, but even at the individual consumer level, switching over from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles at scale would have a huge effect. So I mentioned low carbon foods and getting off meat as the other big one. And we can think about the individual switching the energy plans to energy plans now increasingly provided in places like California, also here in the east coast of the US, but places with lots of providers of wind and solar into the grid. Individuals and businesses can switch to renewable energy plans that source from those renewable supplies. And then we talked a little bit earlier, I think, about about travel and reducing travel. But also there's the possibility of getting of offsetting travel, not only your flights, but your stays at hotels is increasingly official accredited systems for providing offsets or carbon credits for businesses that we can talk about as well.

What makes these types of behavioural change difficult? Well, everyone in BI in the room here will know the usual culprits in the behavioural sciences. When we think about aligning intentions with actions and and we can start with present bias which is almost always present. And as the joke goes, you know, these, these kinds of behavioural change, especially things that require investments and high cognitive effort, have those costs borne immediately. So the solar system, the heat pump, the you have to balance costs immediately the benefits both in maybe savings, but also in terms of environmental impact, take a long time to accrue and they agree with uncertainty. So that's just a hard one for everyone to overcome. I mentioned cognitive load. A lot of the things that we're talking about in the space, particularly home renovation, are really difficult choices for the average person. They're difficult for the average academic. I know lots of colleagues who when we talk about this example, say, yeah, I've I've done exactly this thing. I've thought about renovating my home to make it more energy efficient. But there's many options, you know, solar battery. We'll talk about some of this in a moment. All of these things have multiple attributes, sizes and features, multiple varieties. And not only do you have to make those choices, but you have to think about how you predict the impact, both in terms of your emissions and your finances in most cases. And so, you know, that would include the kinds of calculations that most people don't want to do on an average weekend right? There's inattention. So a lot of the things that we're talking about are changing technologies where the I think so mentioned some of the evidence about the effects, the costs and effects of doing some things that are outdated and just inaccurate. Now, because we're not constantly paying attention to the latest news about low carbon options or changes in energy efficiency technology. And then there's the always the classic the social costs or benefits of particular behaviours. And so any new behaviour that might make you stand out from your neighbours and friends stand apart in that way, you know everyone else is not doing it. Maybe you're less likely to do it than that applies to most new things, including adoption of new technologies that reduce carbon emissions. So these are the typical barriers. We think they're all in play in this space.

This is from what is what is a lot of this chart. This is, you know, our usual walk into any marketing department or the usual sort of model or rational choice. And so there's a consideration stage where people are trying to decide what outcome they want. So maybe reducing their carbon footprint this and then the choice or decision stage where they think about the action that gets in that outcome and they rationally choose the optimal thing to get their outcome. And of course in behavioural science, the mapping looks a little bit. There's this kind of mayhem where you start like thinking about what others are doing and feeling lazy or not inclined to do it today and all the usual behavioural barriers that we just covered. And so that that move from rational consideration to getting what you want is often very hard for most people, me included.

I want to just walk through one example and I'll talk about solar. I work on this later, but this is why I know everyone has thoughts about. So I just I wanted to walk through this a little bit in detail before we talk about our trials and projects. You know, there's there's just a great deal of academic literature now on this particular challenging decision, which is that home owners decisions of whether or not to purchase a rooftop solar system, you know, the details here are really exciting in the sense that I think household energy accounts for about 25% of total electricity demand in most developed countries, including Australia and and about ten or 11% of total emissions. Right. So if we can make a dent in this, it's going to have a huge effect in terms of addressing climate change. The take up in Australia is 30% highest in the world, elsewhere is much lower, including here in the U.S. And so there's a lot that can be done here. But if you think about most Australian homes and the amount of sunshine we get in Australia, you know, there's some estimates saying that like 90, 85, 90% of homes could could exist on solar and and have no emissions associated with household energy bill of values. So if we could do that, we'd be making this huge dent in terms of total draw on the grid and total emissions.

Could we increase, take up that much, you know, what's standing in the way? Well, we know the upfront costs are very high. I just did some research to look at, you know, what it cost to put sort of average sized solar system on a home in Sydney. It's about $8,000. The State Government gives you about $3,000 off. It's still looking at $5,000. If you want a larger system for a larger home, you know, up over $10,000. If you want to put a heat pump, or put in a heat pump system for the average home, you'll have somewhere between two and a half and five and a half thousand dollars. Right. These are not inconsequential amounts for most people, especially those in the working and lower middle classes. So what you know, that most people don't have that tucked away ready to spend. And so that's an immediate area. The complexity of this choice I mentioned before is just enormous. If you think through what you you have to make a decision about, right. The type of solar system, the size you need, whether you should get a storage battery, what kind of storage battery, where are you in the country affects your feed in tariffs from different providers, Right. You have to think about work. Should you switch providers? What's the feed in tariff rate? You have to think about whether to combine it when you're renovating with other renovations. That would make sense at the same time, like heat pumps, insulation on your appliances, old could you upgrade your appliances? You have to think about who would provide the installation for each of these. And you had got multiple choices there. Maybe you're eligible for government rebates on a bunch of these things. It depends upon where you are in the country. You have to research that you probably can't afford the big upfront costs. Maybe you're looking at $20,000 to do the whole thing. So how can you find inside are there lower rate loans available from banks like CBA? Yes, there are, but you have to do the research on that. And then for any combination of these things that you're looking at, at different price points, you have to have a clear prediction of what it will do to your energy bills, whether or not you're paying, you know, financing costs, how you how you have to factor those in. And and then ultimately you'll get some idea of whether or not it's a good choice over what period of time, based upon how long you think you keep the house, you know, and what effect you will have on the value of a home. So that's the kind of complex decision that most of us are just not ready for most, most times of the year. And so that is a huge barrier, I think, to most people taking action in this space. It's just the enormous amount of cognitive complexity and our usual human to that amount of cognitive complexity is decision avoidance by just saying, Well, I'm not ready for that now. I can't do that now. It's too much to take on now. And so maybe next year. And and this, I think, is a very common response guide for us here. Okay. There you go. I wanted to say a little bit about the research in this space. You know, the review of the academic literature here. There's a vast literature on this. It's largely survey based, not feel experimental, but it confirms most of these things in terms of when you survey people and ask them about why they haven't done these kinds of things, there is this big focus on a high perceived upfront costs and the complexity of the choice. There's also an interesting set of literature on neighbourhood effects where, you know, if you see your neighbours doing this, you're much more likely to do this. Bob Frank wrote famously about this a couple of years ago using Google satellite imagery and, and but that may just be, you know, in part a way to address complexity. You can walk over to your neighbour and you see the provider that they're using in their system. They put you on and you ask them, is that a good system? You know, is that working out? And they say, yes, fantastic problem solved, right? You've removed all the complexity. So it could be social pressure, but it could also just be a way to simplify the choice of really quickly the kinds of interventions that people. So it's all focussed interestingly a lot on sort of government regulation and traditional property, you know, levers, economic levers involving incentives, taxes and subsidies. We're mostly dealing with kind of things that could be, although not necessarily by the government, but by by private actors who are trying to encourage adoption. And I'll talk about the bank in a moment. Commonwealth Bank, but you know, so so these fit in this space, especially with decision support that are a bit more behaviourally flavoured as interventions. So the low interest loan is obviously, you know, reducing the costs all talked about that a zero interest instalment plan Commonwealth Bank offers that for solar at the moment as well. So it has a different kind of flavour but it reduces the upfront cost decision support to remove that complexity that's available in a whole bunch of countries in different forms where there's you can put in some information about your home, where you are, how you use the home and you'll get, you know, some recommendation for what kind of system a comparison of different potential ones that fit that broad category. It's very it's very rough as an estimate of what's a good choice. But it's some help. There's a there's a full up kind of intervention that's available that would be a full customised energy audit of your home with forecasting based upon whether you're having kids, you know, a whole bunch of other things that would generate customised recommendations for renovations with a prediction for your cost savings and potentially that third party to manage the installation for you. There's a few providers in Australia, there's very few providers in the US or anything like this that I've seen and I think, you know, this is kind of the full Monty, as it were, like if you really wanted to help somebody get through cognitive complexity with this decision, you would have some kind of push button version of this. And then if you bundled it with a low interest loan so that there's no upfront costs, then you've reduced all the upfront cost and the cognitive complexity. And I think this is the winning ticket. It's very difficult to set up and run, but I think this would be where we would be headed if we could have ideal intervention right.

A couple of notes on this one really quickly, and that is timing really matters. So, you know, it's not just that people don't want to go through this process any time of the year. It's that most homeowners are really only thinking about the possibility of doing something like this at certain times in their journey of owning a home. It's probably not right after they've just gone through this taxing process of selecting a home and buying it. It could be 5 to 7 years out when their family is grown and their finances are in better shape and they're thinking about moving to a different home or the possibility of upgrading. So thinking about timing and for the people that we're trying to encourage here into change, I think is really critical. We've had lots of discussions. Well that with the team, with partners. One thing that's emerging from the research we're doing too, is that this is, for most people, not an environmental choice, but primarily it's a financial choice. You know, and obviously we're working with banks when we when we're doing this work. And so it makes sense from a bank point of view that people are thinking about the bank as a source of a conversation about its financial, about their financial well-being. But even in the survey, as most people report, that the prime motivation is saving cost. And so that's interesting in the end that the main barriers are financial to then doing this kind of thing. And so that really is interesting as it sets it in the realm of how people make decisions about finances. And when they do that, rather than climate action, which we might think about when we decide what we eat in a very different context, I don't think I had time to walk through the electric vehicle choice here, so I might minimise here. Laura is nodding.

So you know, we can talk about similar things with with the on electric vehicles and again like the upfront costs, the high sticker, the sticker shock associated with EVs, especially Teslas, is coming down, but it's still there. And people also, we think, are not paying attention to the changes in battery technology that mean the range is much lot larger than before, longer than before, and charging is easier. And we review that literature, too. And again, we have some recommendations here that we're trying to test with different providers. I won't dwell on this, but I'll I'll talk about the style of research here in the last few minutes and we can answer any questions in Q&A about each of these. If you have some. All right.

So the the base for this research and a lot of it, again, is in Australia is the star lab, which I set up a few years ago and and we worked hard to get that acronym, obviously the STAR lab. But it is fundamentally concerned with issues of sustainability and transparency and accountability. And we're looking at companies that are facing pressures to do something about climate change in particular now, but also some other non-financial goals that spill into the sort of accountability like human rights, public health issues, public education issues, diversity, equality and inclusion issues. And so for many years I started working with some companies on fair trade certification, which is all about human rights and poverty alleviation. And now all the companies are working with are interested in decarbonisation almost overwhelmingly so. And so we're working with a bunch of companies on what they're doing to address these. This issue both for themselves in terms of their own carbon accounting and then because they're being asked to do more by their customers and we think it's very hard for them to do research in this space. They many of our partners are doing their own internal research. But but, you know, typically they haven't measured environmental outcomes, social outcomes. They're quite good at measuring business outcomes. But but we think it's a good space for our behavioural work in this in this area with these partners, again, where we're mostly doing behavioural interventions. So all of your, all of the groups are aligned know quite well about how we do these and how they do because these we think about intentions and actions in this space and we think about all those things like present bias, media attention that get in the way often of converting intentions into actions. And we focus on those typically more, more so than we do, you know, financial incentives and prohibitions. If we're thinking about and we do as just like by now. So that's the focus of our work is the the goals and like that, of course, and you know, we we often do these digitally with because a lot of the companies we work with are selling products online or they're communicating to their customers principally online. And so we don't do a lot of experiments in the digital apps and online in this space. So our partners for most of these multi-year partnership deals for research in this space in like Commonwealth Bank and Qantas, you can see those. We're talking with Woollies at the moment about research. We have been talking with Woollies for ages, but I can talk about some of those conversations as well just in terms of, you know, what commitments they made publicly and what they're hoping to do with their supply chains and so forth. But yeah, we we basically get in at the ground floor with the companies as they're thinking about new initiatives and new products and services and think about how behavioural insights might help to improve the effectiveness of those things. And then we test, we look when they're actually launched, we have a bunch of companies all around the world now that are working with us, so I can talk about some of that work, if you would like in the Q&A and the faculty are a mixed bunch, mostly still at Harvard. David Laibson You will recognise that name. He's worked quite a bit with Commonwealth Bank and Bank of Ireland. Now Rebecca Henderson's an icon in the field, but lots of behavioural scientists in the business, school, economics and department government. Cass Sunstein is now an affiliate. Well of some of the early work we did with with Commonwealth Bank was really focussed on financial wellbeing and so some of this made the news. You may have heard of some of this work we worked on, you know, how, how to help people manage their credit card debt and make better decisions about their credit cards. So some published trials and a case study at the Harvard Business School based upon that work, helping people make decisions that lead to them less likely to get into persistent debt. They have high scores in terms of financial well-being. Now, one of the one of the biggest ones was the benefits finder platform that Commonwealth Bank launched that came out of trials that we did in how the bank could help customers who were eligible for government benefits but were able to access them for whatever reason to actually become aware of those benefits and then access them through a digital experience that was provided by the bank and that proved to be highly popular and much used during the course of the pandemic when a range of benefits were expanded. We had done a lot of work in this area. There's some news about the about the impact of benefits finder that was came out of our trials with the bank and it's still going quite strong. And we're now trying to do a version of that in the US as  well, but this particular tool, what's interesting here is that the bank has been under a great deal of pressure like most big companies, to take a leadership role in climate action. Laura, give me a shout out if I’ve got, how much time I’ve got.

-Yeah, another five, 7 minutes. Perfect.

-Okay, great. So in in 2022, we created a kind of a new four year partnership with the bank to work almost wholly on climate action initiatives that they were interested in developing. And, you know, again, they wanted to be become more of a corporate leader in this space in Australia. And part of this is developing a whole range of of products and services for customers, both individual customers and business customers, to help them reduce their own carbon emissions. So we talked about low interest loans for home innovations. As of Commonwealth Bank has a green loan that many of you were aware of. Principally that is is an enabler for adoption of rooftop solar. So that's a big one that we've been working on. We're still working with them on on on how to make that a better experience and a more effective one and then measure the impact on take up of that. That loan is a low interest loan for electric vehicles that the bank offers as well. And so we're working on that one. The bank, like most banks, has accumulated information about climate risk associated with different locations for property owners in Australia. So this is an emerging issue, I think, for all financial institutions in terms of the risk to their loan book and. And it obviously is there's a risk that they were born in part by their customers to part owners of all those assets. And so it's a really intriguing one in terms thinking not so much about, you know, mitigation, but about adaptation to climate change and how we prepare Australia for severe weather events. Right. And so and this is a behavioural issue because most people don't, don't gravitate to news about, about risk. You know, it's a very it's a negative thing. It's like it's like getting health checks right. If you think the news will be bad, a lot of people will will start acting like ostriches. And so getting people access to this information and helping them to take action to reduce risk, I think is is a real agenda in behavioural work in this area. Like a lot of financial institutions in Europe and in the US, now, there's a carbon tracking tool that's offered by the bank based upon your transactions. We haven't done much work on that. One interesting area that gives people individual measures, their carbon footprint based upon their spending and then people could track changes, they make behavioural adjustments to their lifestyle. So for us generally as behavioural researchers, that kind of information can be quite interesting. And so a lot of people are working on that globally. Other issues like switching of energy sources or business energy sources and and looking for more energy efficient homes when buying areas that we're working on with the bank as well. We doing a bunch of this work with other banks, Truist Bank and the US and Bank of Ireland and in Ireland as well. These are just some of the announcements about the Green loan that started in 2021. The interest rate is no longer 2.99% higher, but but it's still a significant discount on normal loans. We did just where we started. Just to give you an idea of some of the work in this space, you know, a lot of the debates in the in the field when thinking about climate action and take up of solar, how much are people motivated by intrinsic motivation to do something good, to take climate action, to address climate change, kind of the green identity to work versus the pure financials of the situation of choice. And so we've done some testing very when they first launched about whether emphasising the the ultralow rate for the loan and how much you would save by becoming more energy efficient, increased engagement and to an alternative B message that talked about a brighter tomorrow and what you could do to reduce emissions. It turns out that the financial one wins spoiler alert I guess there but that is the most you know the biggest driver of interest in product. Real quick, in the last couple of minutes, we're working with Qantas to have a long term policy with Qantas and I started working with them many years ago, just focusing on their flight carbon neutral program and their carbon offsetting. And Qantas is, you know, one reason to be proud of it. It's a flagship. I know it's had a tough time lately, but it is it is always has the world's leading carbon offsetting program. So most big airlines, you can offset your emissions associated with your flying, but you have to do it retroactively, like after you boat with a third party. It's a it's not a happy process. And so the take up rate is a minuscule but right from a well, from 2010 maybe I can't remember the year they started. Qantas has had a program where you just click a button as you book. And so the take up rates are 9%, they're crazy high for by international standards. So we do a lot of work on that and how we could become more effective if Qantas provided rewards or matching dollars for that, you know, sort of reciprocal norm that that that made it more of a joint effort. And those were very effective interventions. We tested first before they put them in the field. Now we're working on green tier, which is the frequent flyer status for those of you who've done some green things in your in your spending lifestyle. So if you put solar on or have an easy or what are the other things you can offset your home and car use, you can book it at sustainable hotels. It's a range of things that you could credit for and then Qantas will reward you and identify you as a green frequent flyer. So there's a lot of work in that area. That's all behavioural change work associated with the work of Qantas. But this is probably still, I think, the booking page as you go through Qantas and, and yeah, our tests would reveal that this was very effective, this was added to the new version when they added the points rewards. Now I think there's also the dollar match as well when you do this and that's the green tier program that you can check out online if you're interested. But it's an interesting, again, an effort by a big Australian company to facilitate, encourage and support with rewards. Climate action, behavioural change among. It's a very large customer base in Australia, so it's a fascinating project. I'll stop there. Laura, I hope I came in on the time. Perfect.

-Thank you, Michael. That was really interesting. Please everyone remember to submit your questions through the Q&A function and we'll move on now to our final speaker, Professor Ben Newell. And Ben, we sorry, Ben is also a valued member of the Academic Advisory panel and he's a Professor of Behavioural Science and a director of the Institute for Climate Risk and Response at the University of New South Wales. His research focuses on the cognitive processes, underlying judgement, choice and decision making and the application of this knowledge to environmental, medical, financial and forensic contexts. Ben will be presenting on the work of the University of New South Wales Institute of Climate Risk and Response, a new initiative that brings together expertise from across the faculties of science, business and law and justice in partnership with industry and government. It aims to drive an innovative research agenda and be a focus of debate on the risks and opportunities for our changing climate. Welcome, Ben. We're looking forward to your presentation. Over to you.

-Thanks very much, Laura. Good morning, everyone. Just will share my slides Everyone see that okay? Yep. All right. Okay. Thanks very much for the kind introduction I'm going to start. Just I'd like to acknowledge the Bedegal people who are the traditional custodians of the land that I'm presenting from here at UNSW in Sydney, and I'd like to pay my respects to elders both past and present, and extend that respect to other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders present here today. So as Laura mentioned at the start, I'm a professor in school psychology at UNSW and I'm also the director of this new Institute for Climate Risk and Response. And I'm going to give a very quick overview of that institute and then go into three specific projects that are a part of our current sort of research focus and the Institute.

So this institute was established earlier this year and our vision here is to be the dominant voice in the Asia-Pacific region and go to for industry and government in respect of climate risk and response. And as Laura indicated just now, it's it's really to drive fundamental research and development in climate risk and response and to try and provide expertise and information in ways that can feed into risk management frameworks. So we're about partnering with industry, government policymakers to undertake robust planning for the impacts of climate change. And what I think is unique about us is that we're combining expertise from a very strong background in climate science, the physical science of climate change, which we have a large group of highly respected world leaders at UNSW. We host the Climate Science ah the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes here. There's also us, in fact, through science, doing the behavioural science side of things, and then we're partnering with colleagues in the business school and schools of risk and actuarial and finance and economics who are all focusing on different aspects of climate risk in response, and also colleagues in the Faculty of Law and Justice, including people in the Human Rights Institute and people that are working on climate litigation. So feeding all of that expertise into this new institute allows us to address some of the points that I've listed underneath there. So things like translating climate science to inform industry practice and policy. So how do we go from the projections of climate models to actionable work to making decisions? How can we integrate our understanding is that behavioural insights, behavioural science, focus and presentation. So how can we understand and predict climate relevant human behaviour? And then the more legal side of things is how do we going to meet regulatory standards regarding climate change? So I see this as a, as a really positive initiative to bring together of these different perspectives and focus on what is a hugely important challenge. I'll put this up at the end as well, but you can, if you scan that or go to our website, you can find out more and you can join our community and then get in touch and find out about what we're up to. So I just thought I'd start with this slide because I think this is also a helpful slide to think about how the work in the Institute is trying to bring together lots of different, different perspectives. This is a slide which shows what's known in economics is this comes from economics is the integrated assessment model framework. And really what this is showing is how you how you can think about the links between economic activity, greenhouse gas emissions, the climate. And then really what what both Michael and Saul have been talking about in their excellent presentations, which is decarbonisation. Most of what we've been talking about so far today is what are the strategies, what are the behavioural insights we can bring to how we get this decarbonisation happening. Can you see my cursor if I move on the screen? Yeah, this decarbonisation path. And in order to understand the impacts of decarbonisation and the and the overall impact that that's going to have, I think it's important to have this kind of framework in mind. How are we making our decisions about what aspects of decarbonisation are going to be most powerful? What impact is that going to have on economic activity? How is that going to drive or decrease emissions? What are those emissions going to have impact on the climate? And then how do think about the relationship between changes in the climate and economic activity and in these frameworks? We think about that in terms of bit of a damage function. Now, if there's time at the end. I'll get back to discussing this model in a bit more detail. But but I do think it's an important framework to bear in mind as we go through the different specific projects that I want to talk about. Where are we in impinging on this model? Where are we understanding how these different parts that go together? Because I think we can get a bit stuck in our own little world sometimes. But but, but having that bigger picture of how does this all link up and how do these kinds of models actually drive the policy changes that we might expect to see? So if there is time, I'm going to try and talk about three projects that are going to be probably a bit more experimentally focussed than the presentations that we've had up to now. And apologies for nerdy academics in that in that sense, but I'll try and keep the conclusions high level and I'll put a few details in for the people that really want the details of experimental design and so on. So three projects. The first one is going to look at interpretation of projections of future climate change. Then I'm going to talk about a project that is related to some of the stuff that Michael was just talking about in terms of climate risk and understanding that that consumers have about the risk to their properties. And then if I get time, I'll talk a bit more about how climate change is going to impact economic systems. These projects all involved. I'm involved in Project one and two. Project three is being driven by an economist, Tim Neal. He's working with us at the Institute. But if I have time, I'll give a flavour of it. So first project is how people interpret projections of future climate change. On the title. Is that it depends on what they think is most likely to happen, and this is work that I've been doing with Alex Mason, who is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Bath in the UK. So the starting point for this project is that many of you might be familiar with the idea that there are different scenarios, there are different ways that we could that the planet could go as is very topical, we've top starting today. This is a graph that shows the different types of projections that might occur in terms of the increasing global surface temperature, depending on all sorts of different things happen in terms of population, in terms of income, in terms of the levels of of of carbonisation with decarbonisation that we manage to invoke. And the what you can see in this in this figure is that there's a lot of uncertainty about the extent of temperature range that we might see as a function of these different types of pathways and the way that these pathways are used and the uncertainty around them is crucial when we're trying to understand the action that that's going to be most successful, the type of actions that we should take. So for example, we might see descriptions of, well, you know, a worst case or a best case or current trajectory. This is text taken from a paper from PNAS earlier this year or last year, just talking about the different types of temperature rises that we might see if we stay on a current trajectory or if we implement a whole lot of nationally determined contributions. This is part of what's being discussed in COP coming up. Or if if people don't are not able to to to make these kinds of things. And you can see that there are sort of mean temperature rises that people predict and then there are ranges of temperature rises that could predict. We also see this in predictions about sea level rise. So you can have the most optimistic well, it's between 28 and 55 centimetres sea level rise if things are really bad and this fossil fuel development and the temperature is going to go up, the sea level rise is going to be much, much higher. And understanding these kinds of differences between these scenarios and the range of temperatures that we might get and the uncertainty around them is crucial because of the need, as Michael was, was foreshadowing the need for companies increasingly to have to disclose financial risk due climate change. So what are the assets that you hold and how are they going to be affected by different levels of climate risk? And one of the things that that was motivating us in this project is to try and understand what people take from these kinds of projections. Just a very basic kind of cognitive experiment, cognitive question about how do you interpret the uncertainties, not just in the likelihood of which scenario do you think is going to play out? Is going to be one where we decarbonise? Is it going to be one where we don't? And what's your what's the uncertainty around the likelihood of values in those different ranges of projections? Because the difference between now the 15 centimetres sea level rise and a 56 centimetres sea level rise, or the difference between 1.9 and 3.1 has huge implications for the way that we can operate and behave in the future. So we conducted some simple experiments where we were just interested in how people interpret these different types of uncertainty. So uncertainty in which kind of scenario might be the one that, that, that people think the world is on a trajectory towards and their interpretation of these kinds of numerical ranges that are often given in these climate projections. How might that change the judgements in the decisions that they subsequently make or their willingness to take action, for example? And I think the numerical I mean, this is getting a little bit into, I guess the the representation, the cognitive representation of what's going on here, but I think it should be fairly intuitive that if you're given a range like the one at the top of the screen, 2.1 to 3.6 degrees centigrade, then there's a variety of ways in which you could interpret that. You might think that the distribution of temperatures in that is roughly normal. So you know, one's in the middle of that range are going to be more likely than others. You might think it's uniform, it's equally distributed across that range, or you might perceive that to be some kind of skew in that. And often the way that the information is presented doesn't allow you to to understand that. And in fact, the way that the model simulations are done may not even allow you to infer exactly what's going on. But nonetheless we were interested to see how does that actually translate into people's interpretation. So to give a flavour of what we did in this project, we the general method was that gave people descriptions of temperature increases according to these three different scenarios, and we asked them to both estimate the shape of the distribution and tell us which scenario is most likely. And this was just UK citizens. This is an online experiment. We weren't asking experts. We want to go to that level next. But this is just the sort of baseline to understand what people take away from these kinds of statements. So the experiment is very simple. It's like this would say, worst case scenario, climate scientists estimate an increase by 2100 could be as low as four or as high as seven. And then we're asking them. What do you think this temperature, the range values in this range are? And we asked them to select an option that describes the likelihood of these different values. So do you think that will equally likely do you think one's in the middle or more likely edge is a more likely upper values, lower values, and this translates into like a uniform distribution, a normal distribution, a U-shaped, a skewed upper or skewed lower. We didn't give them those terms, but that's the way that you can think about what people are doing here. And then we asked, which scenario do you think is most likely to happen? Do you think it's going to be the best, the worst, or we're going to maintain our current trajectory? What I'm going to show you here is the data from sort of collapsed across four or five different experiments where we replicated this basic result. And I'm breaking these down by participants who chose the current scenario is the one that was most likely. So we just maintain our current trajectory and then I'll show the ones four for best and worst. So the way to read this graph is that these are the proportion of participants endorsing these different sort of distributional shapes for the values in the predicted range. And so people that chose current as most likely predominantly thought that the temperature distributions were going to be either normal or uniform. But there was some bias also towards choosing ones at the upper end of the distribution is. More likely when we gave them the best scenario, they also showed this kind of the bias towards thinking that temperatures at the upper end of that base case are probably going to be more likely. And when we gave them the worst case scenario, they said, well, one's at the lower end, they're going to be more likely. And so there's a sense in which they're sort of forming a distribution over these things, even though that information is not being given to them. In the statement. So we trust these people as kind of maintainers in in the understanding the trajectories, the people who said we think that the planet is on track for the best case. So temperatures at the lower end of those ranges showed that when we gave when they chose the best case as being most likely, they were also in each of the scenarios quite likely to endorse lower temperatures as being more likely. So they were endorsing a kind of skew towards the lower temperatures in each of the scenarios. So even if things got really bad and it was the worst case, the vast majority of people were saying no, even if we hit that worst case, these lower temperatures are going to be more likely. So they're sort of excluding the downside risk of this. So you can think of these people as being more optimistic than the first group. And then finally, we had about 20% of the sample who chose the worst case as most likely. So these people think, no, we're on the trajectory for no one's going to agree to anything at any of the COP summits, no one's going to put in any of the pledges and everything's going to be bad and consistent with this belief that things are going to be they're going to be bad. They they in each of the cases are endorsing temperatures this upper end of the distribution as most likely. So they're being, I guess, highly pessimistic about the trajectory that we're on. Now. What I think is interesting about this is that this is people bringing their own biases about the direction in which they think the planet is going to change the fundamental interpretation of a objective scientific statement that doesn't actually impart that level of knowledge. And so I think it's important to have that in mind when we're when we're giving these kinds of statements and when people are being asked, for example, in the disclosures to pick these different scenarios and report on the basis of the information that they're extracting them may not be the information that was intended. We also found that when we look at the age groups of these different people that we that we allocated to the maintainers, the optimists and the pessimists that you find on average that the optimists are somewhat older and the pessimists somewhat younger, which is, I think a bit of a sobering, sobering finding. So quick summary project one, we find that this optimism and pessimism, the interpretations of this information, we can think about the role of scepticism, motivated cognition in that. I think this raises the question about how to shift people's priors and also a question about whether optimism or pessimism is a better driver of the kinds of climate action that we need to see whether a little bit of anxiety is a good motivation or not. These are all questions I think, that emerge from this this simple project.

Okay, I'm now going to jump to project two. I'm happy obviously to take questions on all of these at the end, but Project two is being led by Dr. Omid Ghasemi. He's a post-doc here with us at the ICRR and I believe is on on the call. And this is one that speaks to this this idea about the influence of climate risk scores on property purchase decisions. So as we heard in Michael's talk, this is something which the information that people have, the potential impacts of their homes to climate risks. And the motivation for this is that there are now several different places online and organisations and companies that will provide these kinds of climate risk scores for your properties. Now, there's a whole separate debate here about the extent to which these scores are actually accurate or can can be given at the level of accuracy and precision that some of these providers are arguing they can. I'm just going to take that and put it to one side for now and talk about the fact that they're out there and we're interested to see what impact they have. These are just examples from, different online sources that you can look up and get this kind of information about individual properties, some in the US and some in Australia. So what we what we've done in this project so far is really just to get some sense from a very simple experimental approach looking at whether or not people integrate these kinds of climate risk scores and climate risk information into a decision about buying properties. So it's it's a hypothetical. It's in a lab, but it's giving us a little bit of a guidance on what's the kind of influence that these schools have on people's decisions. And so the way that we set up the experiment is that we designed a situation where people on individual trials were given information about different types of properties that they might be interested in purchasing. They were given information about how much money they had to spend, the estimated price details about the property. And then what we were manipulating was the level of climate risk information that they were given about each property. And we gave some examples and they explained what these things were and the design was set up so that the same type of property you would see it either the same subjects or between subjects, we'd see it with either climate risk information that was high or climate risk information that was low or no climate risk information. So it's a pretty straightforward design. And then which is eliciting from them, how willing would you be to buy this property? A hypothetical question. We did free online experiments. The details for the people that are interested are all there. But the basic the basic point of the experiments is that you're making multiple decisions, 50 judgements across trials, and you're being shown properties that have different levels of climate risk information and the third experiment that I'll get to, we also manipulated things like whether the risk information was about the postcodes that the property was in or the property itself. In the first two experiments that were about the property itself and the and the information was always about climate risk. For the next 30 years, the Basic results here are pretty simple to show. In our first experiment, we had three between subjects groups. One group didn't get any climate information and one got low risk and one got high risk. And you can see here that people getting the high risk information quite sensibly show allowing lower willingness to buy on average across these properties than people getting the low risk or the knowing folks. But interestingly, no info in the low risk didn't differ in this case. So what that means about people's assumptions about properties that don't have that climate risk information is, I think, interesting in a second experiment, I should say experiment to there sorry, we manipulate it from within subjects. So now the same participants saw properties that either had no low or high risk and now we see a bigger differentiation between people's willingness to buy as a function of this risk information. So both people that got low risk and no information were more likely to buy the properties than those that got the high risk. And there was also a difference between the low risk and the information. And in the third experiment, we manipulated both this kind of time horizon. So whether this was the risk for the next 12 months or the risk the next 30 years and the granularity of it. So whether the risk information was about the postcode that the property was in or the property itself, the kind of address level, we had a hypothesis that we would see a difference between the 12 months and 30 years and a difference between the granularity level. We didn't see that in our experiment. So what you can see here across all four of those plots is that people are much more willing to buy the low risk property than the high risk property, but that doesn't interact with the level of granularity or the time frame over which that information is being presented. They do however they people were sensitive to the accuracy of these different types of measures. So we asked a few follow up questions. The end first, just as a out of interest, we wanted to see how many of our participants were aware of the potential to get climate risk reports for properties. The vast majority are unaware that this thing is happening. I think that's going to change rapidly over the next few years. I think, you know now can get energy rating reports for properties. I think very soon there will be a push towards getting these climate risk ratings and it's going to be important to figure out whether or not the accurate. But what they did show was that they they believed that the the risk ratings for the short term scores would be more accurate than the risk ratings for the long term. And they thought that the postcode level was probably more accurate than the property level. So there's some interesting intuitions underlying what how people perceive these things, even if they're not influencing their decisions. We also asked people about their own experience of disasters. The climate, belief and hand looked at how this related to their willingness to buy these kinds of properties. We found some somewhat inconsistent patterns in the first experiment and the third experiment. No relationships in the second experiment, but the ones that we did find a kind of sensible, so higher experience of disaster in climate leave, climate belief, positively related to willingness to buy the low risk properties in experiment one and then the third experiment higher perceived and expected risk due to climate change negatively related to willingness to buy high properties. So the relationships are not strong, but they're they they seem sensible. So quick Summary Project Two people do seem to be sensitive to climate risk information in. These hypothetical property purchase decisions the sensitive to but not affected by the time horizon and granularity. And we see some impacts of prior risk and belief. Now I think this is a very simple first step and looking at how people use this information, how we might best display this information. And I think there's definitely scope for trials in the fields for the work that Michael was talking about. And CBA are also involved in some of that climate action work. And we were just talking yesterday actually in a meeting with them about the need to start figuring out the best way to communicate this information to customers. How am I doing for time, Laura? About 3 minutes left. 3 minutes. Okay, I'm going to try and cover Project Three in 3 minutes. This is this is Tim Neal’s work. It's not my work, but I'm just going to give a very brief overview because it goes back to the fundamental framework that I started with. So work using those integrated assessment models in economics tries to estimate how climate change damage would be distributed around the world. This figure from a paper by Burke et al, suggests that in fact climate change might be quite good for some countries. So this is a map of the percentage change in GDP per capita, according to the the way that the impact is modelled. Now, the very short version of this of this work is that one of the reasons why it appears in these kinds of analyses that some countries will benefit from climate change and others won't is because the assessment of the impact is done at the level of each individual country and it doesn't incorporate the external effects. Weather changes around the world and how a change in one country is not going to happen in isolation to a change in another country. And if there's change in another country, then that's going to have knock on effects for other for other countries. And that that then is going to actually lead to much worse outcomes than you might expect If you're just focusing on weather shocks in one country. I realise this isn't a big topic per se, but I think it's very important because. It does link back to this notion of how does decarbonisation actually act on economic activity, how does that drive the emissions how does that drive the change in climate and how do we think about that as a, as an inclusive interactive framework with all these feedbacks in it? I won't go into the details here, but I will point you to this article in the Conversation that Tim wrote last month, which has a fantastic basic summary of that work that you will be able to understand and will be explained in a much clearer way than I had. So that's three projects before a whistle stop runs through. Those are the three people that did all the work. My email address is at the top. Also, please do get in touch with us at the ICRR and email there and the code is there if you want to get in touch. Thank you very much.

-Thank you so much, Ben. That was really fascinating as well. And I think we've had three amazing presentations here today. I, I have dozens of questions for each of you, but I will restrain myself a little bit. So we're opening up for Q&A. We've already had quite a lot of excellent questions coming through, so we're not going to be able to ask all of them. But I do want to ask on my own first of. So I was just wondering, I was interested in what you were saying about incentivising innovation of lower carbon foods by taxing producers and how people supported that rather than taxing consumers. But I was curious as to how that might impact behaviours. Are you expecting that farmers are going to adopt more innovative agricultural practices or switch to producing other kinds of products, or are they just going to pass on that tax to consumers in the cost of the final product? Oh you’re on mute

-I'm sorry, rather than speculate, why don't I just talk to what happened with the the levy on sugar sweetened beverages. I mean, what you saw there and I could fumble around with the slides and get us back there, but what you could see in that slide is where the thresholds where the tax was introduced, there was a lot of innovation to basically change the formulation of the beverages to avoid the tax. And so essentially they just changed the range of options that were available so that they were healthier, they avoided paying the tax. And that innovation meant that all of the drinks that were valuable for consumers then had less sugar in them. So if you, you know, by extension we applied something similar very behaviourally informed tax that supplier faced side with food then I would hope not that that should be the design of it so that you optimise it. So the reformulation or the innovation happens over time and maybe you need to, you know, give people enough time, give producers enough time to prepare for this before it is introduced. And then the hope would be that it that you allow a much smaller shock on their side and a kind of an avoidance of that of, you know, if business as usual. Yes, maybe they receive the tax. But would you encourage that kind of and incentivise that innovation so that the marketplace changes at the consumer level?

-It I'll have a question here from from someone in the audience. Someone's asked, did your research go to factors influencing when people were willing to pay a green premium? Was it related to the perceived impact, the ease of the size of the cost difference?

-Is that directed at myself? Sorry. Yes, sorry. I thought. That. Could you repeat the question? It's about the timing.

-Yeah. The factors that influence when people were willing to pay a great premium. So whether it was related to the perceived impact, the ease of the size of the cost difference.

-That’s a good question. I'd have to go into the nuance there. I'm not I'm not entirely sure about how they differentiate. Said that in in the research, but I'm sure I would hope that it is available in the data and I'd be happy to follow up on that. That person would like to email me personally.

-Perfect. Thank you. I've got a question here for Michael, but it might be an interesting one for Saul as well. And Ben, but we'll throw to Michael first. So Saul have given a good overview of greenwashing, and then Michael discussed the complexity of some climate behaviours. So for both of you, is decision fatigue the reason why greenwashing is so effective? Who would like?

-I don't know. It's a good one. I can

-I can take a first try there. So I think in a decision it definitely requires effort to, to value statements by company and try it. So there's a there's an element of that that sort of you can think of as a as a avoidance of that. If you're not thinking too hard about whether or not you should believe this claim is an avoidance of effort. And so and we're you know, we there's there's some literature of that sort of tendency to believe communication problems display them, you know, all else equal in terms of messengers. So there's a there's an interesting part of it. I think there could be that. It's also just, you know, our standards for for assessing claims are fairly low. Like this is a you know, where especially when you're making everyday decisions about groceries and things like that, like who knows what organic really millions right? Like if you if you dig deep into sort of the things or all natural or, you know, all those claims and and they skirt you know they often skirt around issues using language that is generally okay not legally deceptive. And so it's a very interesting it's a very interesting area in terms of, you know, what is truth and what are our standards for establishing truth. So I just I teach this paper about BP's, you know, Beyond Petroleum campaign and the effect it had on behaviour of people buying petroleum in the U.S. after Deepwater Horizon. And but one of the things that's not proven in the paper is it's like with is the truth and beyond petroleum. Like they were sort of saying what the company is committing to and how it's, you know, it's doing some good things. And so you can't sort of say immediately, well, that was greenwashing. It was like advertising aimed at, you know, establishing more consumer trust in the brand of BP. But was it deceptive and greenwashing? I mean, I mean, interesting to see Saul Saul’s, I think claims about the the energy suppliers and exactly how they establish what is, in fact, a greenwashing claim, what is legally deceptive, you know, what agency would actually take action against it, Sort of you know, it's very hard to imagine that the consumers capable of that, which is probably why it is, you know, supporting eco labelling. Right. As an independent third party certification of claims.

-Thanks, Michael. Would you like to answer?

-So yeah, I think Michael touched on so many interesting threads there, but I do think fundamentally it is about trust and it is about making decisions easier for people. I think when you do go into a supermarket or any kind of market place, it can often be really difficult to determine which is the more green option. And B, if there is an indication whether you can trust that indication and for sure that I think I'm not sure or can't remember that the cognitive strain is that the term that Michael used. But you know, cognitive scarcity like it adds a complexity to the task that I'm sure overwhelms many consumers and steers them away from making those decisions. And what kind of we also draw attention to an up paper is that it's also disincentivizes that produces all that the businesses from then taking action because it's the at the consumer level if you can't differentiate differentiate between the better option then the good actors, the good banks and the good superannuation services products that they don't have an incentive to then keep doing what they're doing because they can't signal to the consumer that, hey, we're actually doing this great thing. So yeah, I think that there's there's a whole level of kind of shrouding of the market that happens with greenwashing. And I do think as Michael touched on just right at the end, having some kind of certification or authority that, you know, you can trust then would take all of that difficulty out of the task and then reduce that strain on people's attention and reduce the complexity of the task.

-Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think it's such a fascinating area how you have I mean, it's much easier to identify as a green business and to show your green credentials. It's the kind of work you do is not truly sustainable. If you're selling organic vegetables or something, then you're not competing against oil companies to to look more green than them. So, you know, fantasies competing against other airlines and and BP is is not competing against them. Yeah. So it's just in the choice and how can you look great in a bakery when you're in those industries.

-An interesting one for Michael there was a follow up question about greenwashing, which was whether the Harvard program has considered the likelihood that a business might be using some of your programs for greenwashing posts.

-Yeah, I mean, we are very selective in terms of who we choose as partners. And one of the criteria is that in the actual initiatives addressing, you know, social or environmental outcomes that are measured and reported back. So, you know, the almost the defining trait of a greenwashing campaign is that they don't really care about the environmental outcome and they're not measuring the impact and reporting it back. So I think like our criteria are pretty much aimed at, you know, not working, not looking for bad guys. But, you know, you get one of the interesting things in working this space is that you see where the rubber meets the road for businesses, Right. Like this is not charities. Like they're not the WWF, Right. They're not that you know, that they don't they're not separately funded. They need to make money and all. And so we expect them to maybe incur some costs to do something decarbonise is or pursues a non-financial goal. But but, you know, they also have to not go bankrupt. And so we're working in this interesting space where often what businesses where we're partnering with do is they take risks. So, you know, this thing that we're doing is is risky. If customers really don't want to do this thing, they really don't want to renovate their home, they really don't want to take our lives, then we have to lose a whole bunch of money, you know, you know, say, with Qantas and green tier, setting up all this apparatus, it customers really don't want this. It's just a big, costly thing that they've committed to right. And so they've got they've got some skin in the game. It doesn't mean that it may not turn out to be a good business move. It's just that they don't know going in and they're expecting a lot of costs in sort of trying these things. So that to me is a really interesting space to be in. But it's not like, you know, it's not Wal-Mart replacing incandescent bulbs with LED lights like you should do that anyway. Like, you see, it doesn't prove that you care about the environment, right? You're not taking any real risk there. But the companies we're working with are really in this space of risk. I think. I think I just go that there. I think that one of the things that's going to happen in the discussion about greenwashing is, as Michael was saying, the end that there's going to be a shift anyway. Right. And it's going to have to happen because of the disclosures. They are going to be changing and businesses are going to have to move in this direction. And I think there is a you know, there's cold feet amongst lots of industry, certainly in Australia, in the superannuation industry, because of the litigation that's been brought against some companies who who have been caught making claims that don't stand up to scrutiny where there's clear, but there are clear rules about if you say that your fund doesn't invest in these sorts of activities and then it clearly does, that's a false claim and you can be done for. But I think that the almost behind the the the marketing side of it, just in the actual ways that these businesses are investing and developing there's an acknowledgement that that climate is something they have to incorporate into their business. And so I think it's a it's not just about the customer facing greenwashing aspect anymore. Absolutely.

-Thank you. I'd like to ask a little bit about to Michael about the complex choices he was describing around the home upgrades. And he said timing is everything. And you talked about this 5 to 7 year mark. And I was really curious about that because I I'd sort of imagine people might want to do some renos, but before they move away, furniture in when they first buy a house and obviously people do upgrades when they're trying to sell, is is there something that you think happens at the 5 to 7 year mark? Is it a is it triggered by something like a life course transition? Do you think that's what's predicting this period?

-Yeah, it's it's based on some data that we had from some of the partners not not severe in this case, but this suggests that it's very common among first home buyers to, you know, be overwhelmed by the by the first choice and so going to them with, you know, other choices at the time that they picked a home and, you know, figured out how to pay a mortgage for the first time. And they've never had an energy bill that place. Right. And talking to them about their energy bills is sort of just the wrong timing. Whereas, you know, people who've lived in the house for short amount of time, they know what their energy bill is like. They hate that energy bill. They know what the problems with the home are now. Really well, they've talked to other people who live nearby about what they're doing to their home, and maybe they have now, you know, they've had they've had kids. They realise that, you know, either want to move on to another home this larger or they want to renovate their home. That seems to be kind of a fairly typical journey, you know, And but it's it's, you know, it's not based on a huge amount of data at the moment, but seems to make sense. You know we know in in most other areas of behavioural change, timing, timing is really important. You know, the calendar matters. You know, the moving having a of a family or critical things. And so we imagine there's something in the space that looks similar to that.

-Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I have a question now for Ben about project two, whether or not I think it would have been fascinating when I was buying my place to see that those risks of different environmental and climate risks that might happen and and how they might affect the place where I was moving to. And I guess I was curious. I mean, in the experiment, people were seeing variations on all those risks in in real life, if I'm moving to to Broome or to a particular area, we're going to see a lot of variation within the choice set in terms of what the climate risks are for that area. Is there still going to be a reasonable about of of of difference between the different houses? I'm looking at or are they all going to be about the same for the postcode?

-Yeah, I think it's a good question. I mean, it it depends on obviously the size of the postcode. So to begin with and postcodes in Australia vary massively in terms of their size and therefore their exposure. I think one of the things that is a really pertinent question is the specificity and the granularity of these models and the predictions that they can make and the timelines that they can, that they can make these projections over. And so whether you can actually have a model that is sufficiently to be able to say, well, this house on this side of the road has climate risk or X, and this one on the other side of the road has climate risks for Y. And from my conversations with climate scientists, they saying that that isn't you can't do that. The models just don't have that level of specificity. And yet there are providers who are giving you that that level of variation. But I take your point that if if you if in the process of your choosing a place to live, you've already identified a given postcode, then the variation that you're going to see across that postcode might not be as broad as we're giving it in the experiment. But just on that point real quick, Laura, like Ben - totally agree. Like absolutely right. And but there is there is some interesting variation. Know how big it is at the moment like that. But in, you know, homes that have had been renovated for [inaudible] by type of roof lights are only sceptics, fireproof, you know, those kinds of things. So so there's like property specific features that that obviously play a role. But you know. Yeah. Then you combining the data on that, which may not be accurate with the other data which may not be fully accurate. Well that's right. Yeah. Because then you've got, you've got the, the, the data from the climate models that supposedly giving you the physical, you know, characteristics of the area. But then if you've got to update that with information coming from whoever real estate the vendor about what type of roof covering I've got then yeah that's that makes it a whole lot harder And that kind of nuance is not really imparted. When you get a number that says your house is a seven out of ten, right? You're Yeah, absolutely. So I still think that information would be really, really valuable, especially if you're moving into a new area and you don't know those things. Then using that to leverage action, like helping people to to put in those place, those mitigations that can help protect them from those risks.

-Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really useful. Let me see what other questions I have. If there's another question you've been corresponding to project one, did you do any research to understand the characteristics of the optimistic versus the pessimistic cohorts or differences in their climate related behaviours?

-Yeah, that that work is underway in the field as we speak. So our initial set of experiments were really just to get a sense of what information people were getting from those different types of projections. And really the only kind of demographic difference that we have is that age related. One showing that the the pessimists, the people that think that the worst trajectory is the most likely are the youngest, which is a sobering finding. But what we're doing now is, yes, to see whether or not that actually trends that that translates into a willingness to do different types of climate actions or as as sort of downstream effects on people's behaviour, because I think that, you know, that that's the part that you then need to be able to connect up to, to what's the impact of the uncertainty on people's willingness to take action. The one thing that we did have in that sample was that they were all all the participants were screened in terms of their belief in climate change. So they were all people that had had ticked a button that said, yes, I think climate change is a thing rather than no, it's not. But yet. But I'll tell you the next one of these what those people are willing to do.

I think those cohort effects are really fascinating and I mean, I don't know if you had a your research had any kind of unpack that in any more detail. But did you have any if it didn't, do you have any hypothesis for what's behind that cohort effect?

I mean, Yeah. I have my own and -  Happy I'm happy to hear your, your you made the specifically the age difference in the pessimist. And optimist?

-Yeah. Well when, when my colleague Alice was analysing that then sent me a snapshot of it, she said, you know, the boomers have caused all the problem and they had and they don't care about it. So that should that should be the title of the paper about that, because that the older cohort are the ones that say, Yeah, be fine, the younger ones are the ones saying that we're all, we're all screwed. That's out of my brain is going in that direction of kind of overconfidence, bias, or maybe there's a lot of guilt underlying that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It could well be it.

-Yeah. Finally, here is a great question that brings it all together. So for all of you, so there is often a duality of doing something good for the planet, like contributing to the broader climate change issue that is quite against personal benefits like financial offsets, eating health from eating more vegetables or getting Qantas rewards or choosing a house that's not at risk. As a final closing comment, which do you think is a more important motivator for people's decision, or what is the key contextual consideration? So anyone who'd like to start? Or I nominate someone?

-I’ll have a go. It’s a big one, go Ben. So so what's the bigger motivator, personal reward or benefit for planet? You think that's that that's the way you.

-It's up to you. It's up to.

-You ask the question how are you balancing that so that in the weaselly way our answer is it depends on probably depends on the person. Some people will be more motivated by one than the other. But if I had to put if I had to put money on it, I think, you know, the data from both Saul’s presentation and Michael's and what we've done shows that, you know, cost and personal impact is going to be a big driver of these things. And it just we just need to get to the point where those that that the action is going to have the biggest decarbonising effect has to also be the one that is not just easier in the end, but cheaper. And we're not there yet because the EV is still $20,000 more expensive than the Camry. But yes, so how how you get those two things to align is, is the challenge. I guess we're all working on that.

-Saul probably wants to jump in to this. You know, there's a big literature on on whether or not, you know, one motivation crowds out another as well. Like, you know, is can you can you really feel like you're doing a good thing if you're better off financially at the same time, you know, Do you really? Does it demotivate you if you're a person that really wants to be a good person and they're thinking about that as a prime motivation, if you're getting rewarded financially, then that undermines your ability to reward yourself with self-esteem, you know, and with reputation. So if you're being observed and you know it's clear that you're benefiting financially, then the motivation for doing it for a for a good reputation diminished. And so it's very complex in the setting. You know, like, I think, you know, when we're when we're dealing with the context of financial decisions about for a homeowner, for example, you know, people are almost in a mindset that like, what does it take to be a good homeowner? It's like making good financial decisions about costs and so forth. So It's very hard to sort of suddenly say, now I think about the planet and future generations and, you know, whether you're a good person, whereas there are other context in which you're a, you know, at a market, you know, in your community making a buying decision where it could be, well, I'm going to be I'm going to be seen to be doing something that's costly, but it's obviously for the good of everyone, you know, and that in that context, maybe you feel more rewarded personally and reputationally. And so paying more in that setting is fine. You know, in fact, it's important. It's a it's the signal. So it's it's it's a it's a mix of things. I don't think we figured it out is like how universal for sure.

-Thanks. And in the last minute did you have a comment?

-So yeah. The thing that I was going to say, Michael touched on right at the end, but essentially the other kind of spicy ingredient I'd add to plate is just that. Yeah, as Michael kind of said to be. And just when, when it is a costly action, I think these peer effects can be powerful. And you know the data that you pointed to those interesting studies about solar panel contagion is really interesting. And I think we've all felt that that effect in our own lives in a number of is where you just do the thing that other people do because that's it's has its own reward mechanism. And I think hopefully where environments behave is a costly that might help incentivise especially as the numbers grows as vegetarian options become more available and more your friends are doing it, it'll feel easier and better to do it.

-Perfect. Thank you very much Saul, Michael and Ben, and thank you everyone for joining online and letting you know the recordings will be on our website soon.