There is an urgent need for cities to rapidly transform their food, transportation, and energy systems to reduce their environmental impact.

By empowering their citizens to adopt more sustainable behavior, cities can harness their collective power and catalyze lasting change. Building off the principles and learning tools outlined in WWF’s Save Nature Please framework, this guide provides science-based behavior change interventions that can be used to build low-carbon and resilient cities. It guides city leaders to:

• Develop Behavior Change Interventions: Scoping the problem and goal, knowing the audience, creating a vision, increasing participation, and being aware of key barriers.

• Deliver Interventions: Making them easy, attractive, social and timely.

• Measure and Scale Interventions: Including the importance of piloting, learning, evaluating and reviewing a checklist for success.

Even if a local government invests in new bike lanes or bus routes, then what? What does it take for urban residents to use them? Local governments must not only provide sustainable infrastructure but encourage citizens to engage with it. 

Though altering behavior is not easy, behavioral science can help us understand citizens’ choices and encourage them to make more sustainable ones. Policymakers can start by defining a target group, and once the group’s motivations are understood, they can then choose certain mechanisms, or levers, to tackle specific behaviors. There are six levers lifted in this guide, as defined by RARE: Center for Behavior and Environment.