India has made significant strides in tackling climate change, yet achieving substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions requires a renewed focus on individual behaviours and lifestyle choices. While policy has strongly emphasised the need for technological solutions such as solar panels or electric vehicles—climate change is, at its core, a social challenge. These new technologies that are essential to combating climate change require widespread adoption that hinges on people changing their behaviours to integrate these solutions into their everyday lives.
For example, in domains like electricity consumption, waste management, and even mobility, individual decisions—choosing to walk instead of drive, segregating waste, or turning off lights—play a pivotal role in curbing emissions. Yet, efforts to promote behaviour change in these domains have yielded limited success. Initiatives like India’s ambitious Mission LiFE (Lifestyle for Environment) have done important groundwork by spreading awareness about sustainable practices that people can adopt, but awareness alone isn’t enough.
A key challenge in encouraging action lies in the way climate action is framed. Messaging tends to focus on abstract, long-term goals like ‘saving the planet’ or ‘stopping pollution’, which can feel distant, overwhelming, or even irrelevant to an individual’s daily life. People often struggle to see how their small actions meaningfully connect to such large challenges.
There’s a need to reframe climate action in ways that resonate more deeply with people. Research indicates that people are more responsive to messages that emphasise direct, personal benefits over abstract, long-term environmental gains. For example, a campaign in Northern England used personalised nudges to encourage participants to adopt sustainable mobility modes. Messages like: ‘Did you know you could burn 300 calories by cycling to work today’ or ‘Did you know you could catch the #19 bus home at 16.50?’ encouraged 70 percent of participants to travel more sustainably. Alternatively, purely climate focused messaging, such as ‘India could save energy if commuters turned off their cars at traffic lights’ or ‘Segregating waste is good for the environment’, is less relatable and thus harder for individuals to connect with. By framing behaviours with economic, performance, or health benefits, campaigns can create a stronger, more immediate motivation for action than climate-only appeals.
Health framing as an approach to climate action
Health has emerged as a highly effective framing for encouraging climate-friendly behaviours. Health-based frames not only resonate well with audiences but also create co-benefits by addressing public health and environmental issues simultaneously. For example, framing the adoption of electric vehicles or public transportation as solutions to air pollution, emphasising reduced respiratory risks, connects with individuals on a more personal level. Similarly, promoting waste segregation as a step toward a cleaner city and hence with disease reduction, makes it more relevant to people’s daily lives.
Recent research published in Nature, done across 5 countries in 2022, showed that health related messaging has the potential to increase support for climate policies, especially among those less concerned with climate change. Health framing has proven effective in fostering behavioural change while simultaneously delivering decarbonisation co-benefits. Examples of such successful initiatives in this regard like the World Car-Free Day and Breathe Life campaigns demonstrate this approach by focusing on the health advantages of reducing air pollution. It has also proved successful in other sectors, including climate adaptation, where campaigns have effectively leveraged health framing to motivate action. For example, emphasising the benefits of staying cool, reducing the risk of heat stroke, and preventing heat-related illnesses has successfully driven individuals to adopt protective behaviours.
However, health is not always incorporated in messaging for low-carbon climate action, despite its potential to drive behavioural change. One reason for this is the fact that health benefits of climate action are often long-term. For example, improved cardiovascular health doesn’t result from one day of walking or cycling to work, nor does air quality improve from one day of reduced car usage. Another reason that health framing hasn’t been widely adopted lies in the silos within which both climate and health professionals work. Many climate scientists are focused on the urgent need for emission reduction, viewing this as the core issue that demands societal attention. They often assume that people should care about climate change due to its implications for the planet at large. As a result, some see health framing as a distraction that risks diluting the fundamental message around the climate crisis and its existential urgency.
What’s needed to integrate health and climate messaging
It’s clear that health-framing and messaging has immense potential to garner public support for much-needed low carbon lifestyle choices. To fully leverage this opportunity, the following steps are crucial:
- Fostering interdisciplinary collaboration: Effective health-based messaging requires partnerships across disciplines and government departments. Public health professionals, behavioural scientists, and climate experts must collaborate to craft messages that resonate on multiple levels. For e.g., for large-scale campaigns targeting energy-saving behaviours, government agencies like energy authorities and DISCOMs need to be key partners. Establishing new institutional frameworks to facilitate such partnerships is essential—initiatives like Mission LiFE provide promising models to build upon. An example of such collaboration is “No Vaccine for Climate Change” launched by Healthy Energy Initiative India, in partnership with health organizations. The document is designed to prepare healthcare workers for various conversations around climate change and subsequent health impacts with their patients.
- Contextual research to identify priorities: Behavioural campaigns must be rooted in research that identifies the most effective ways to link health and climate for different audiences. Health impacts must feel relatable, tangible, and locally relevant. This requires exploring how messages can be tailored to specific contexts, backed by trusted messengers, compelling storytelling, and jurisdiction-specific data. Only by understanding local health priorities can campaigns effectively inspire behavioural change. For e.g., In Alappuzha, Kerala, improved waste segregation was linked to controlling dengue and other vector-borne diseases which helped gain community support.
- Demonstrate success to engage climate scientists: Climate scientists and professionals need evidence of the transformative potential of health framing. Showcasing successful campaigns and tangible examples of interdisciplinary collaboration can help illustrate how health messaging complements, rather than detracts from, the urgency of climate action. Demonstrated success can shift perspectives and encourage broader adoption of this approach.
To take this forward, new systems are needed to ensure behavioural communications are part of climate and health programs across the country. One approach is the institutionalisation of behavioural officers in cities to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and ensure messaging is evidence-based and contextual. Another is allocating dedicated funding for communications within state-level urban, health and climate programs, ensuring there are resources to develop dedicated outreach and messaging. Finally, training and capacity building for the government on the role of behavioural change is essential to embed and scale this approach.
This piece was originally published in the India Development Review.
