Nature In Your Face - Disruptive Climate Change Communication to Trigger Societal Transitions

With less than ten years to reach big reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, changes in our lifestyles are necessary. So far, the consensus has been that citizens must not be disturbed and changes need to be introduced gradually, without challenging people?s assumptions and ways of doing. The project "Nature In Your Face? (NIYF) takes a different approach. We can only reach the target of limiting climate change to manageable degrees if all parts of society draw in the same direction; and that includes politicians, administration, industry, citizens, and education. Getting all important actors in society at the same table is not easy, and we hypothesize that you need events that disrupt everyday life to create the motivation to engage in such a process. Thus, the NIYF project will develop a method further, which combines creating unexpected and, to a certain degree disturbing events with a series of future workshops stimulating creativity and leading to unusual and new solutions. Such interrupting events could be art installations in the public space that intervene in daily life, elements of nature popping up in unexpected places, temporary closures of roads to host a playful street theatre around mobility, or something the like. We will develop these events with our many project partners and artists. We create the events to get an emotional reaction to the topic (and may that be a negative reaction at first). Then we design the workshops afterward to link the different sectors in society in a creative process, thinking out of the box, daring to question established assumptions. Finally, the participating partners will implement these solutions. We will test the method in four cases around Norway on questions of food, mobility, plastic, and housing. We will quantify the achieved savings in greenhouse gases and develop a strategy for spreading the methodology to other cases to make a real contribution to fighting climate change at the local level in Norway. So far, we have established criteria for baseline data for the cases and also developed two eco-visualizations, one for the food- and one for the mobility case. These eco-visualizations have been conceptually developed and fully working prototypes are now ready to be tested out in connection with associated vision workshops.

Nature in your face (NIYF) is a collaboration project between the public sector, the private sector, civil society, and science to stimulate fast transition of local societies towards carbon neutrality. NIYF proposes - based on experiences from previous projects and a proof-of-concept study - a new methodology for engaging citizens and stakeholders at the municipal level in a structured process of creative and disruptive local change. The methodology challenges the assumption that the change needed to meet the carbon targets formulated in the Paris agreement (limiting global warming to well below 1.5 degrees) can be reached in the remaining 11 years with incremental, non-invasive behavior engineering techniques such as nudging or gamification. The project rather explores the potential of disruptive communication elements to push citizens and stakeholders out of their comfort zones and into creative and radical modes of re-creating futures. The methodology proposed contains three steps: (1) Framing: A strongly disruptive element is introduced into the local society, e.g. an impressive and to a certain degree disturbing artwork or eco-visualization around the topic of climate change. This communication element triggers an emotional reaction, which then is taken up in a process of framing the problem and working with solutions. (2) Twisting: in a guided process, the initial energy from the emotional confrontation is twisted into a creative exploration of innovative solutions, engaging all relevant societal actors from all sectors. (3) Using: The last stage is using the developed solutions in the local social system (or refining them further). The methodology will be applied in four cases (mobility, housing, food, and plastic) and iteratively adjusted and evaluated in a formative, action-research based approach. The CO2 savings of each realized case will be assessed by LCA based environmental scenario analyses and an upscaling assessment will be conducted.