What are Green Nudges?

With the climate crisis, humanity faces one of the biggest challenges of all time. We simply cannot afford to keep going as we have over the last several decades. We need to change – but change in itself is hard.

If you ask people whether they support sustainable behaviour or “green(er)” choices as a means to save our planet, and thus keep it inhabitable for future generations – a majority would certainly say yes.

However, as anthropologist Margaret Mead pointed out years ago: “What people say, what people do and and what people say they do are entirely different things.” People may support the good cause, but still like their daily meat, their big combustion SUVs and their long hot showers – these (immediate) pleasures take priority over being more “green”. This is known as the “attitude-behavior-gap” or “intention-action-gap”.

The Green Nudges that we will showcase are meant to trigger real action: sometimes immediate and sometimes at a later stage when people are faced with a decision and still have that nudge in mind. Not all of them have data available to back up the effectiveness. But we understand them as inspiration for institutions, decision makers or individuals for a greater good. For real action.

The idea of nudging is not new and there are already quite a few nudges surfacing. But we have the feeling that the majority of them are hidden inside theoretical abstracts and scientific publications.

Our objective with our Green Nudges series is to make these examples more accessible to a general audience and most certainly much easier to understand.