About the project:

Due to the urgency to transform society and tackling the challenge of climate change, science needs to go beyond incremental change. NIYF develops and tests a methodology to stimulate transformative societal change in a co-constructive way with citizens and stakeholders from the civil, public, and private sector.

The main objective of NIYF is to stimulate societal engagement through deliberately confronting citizens and stakeholders with unexpected and potentially upsetting appearances of nature, climate effects, or carbon-neutral lifestyle scenarios in an artistic way. This is followed up with a structured process of co-creating action capacity in local communities through inclusive vision workshops (in which future lifestyles are explored and negotiated), thus removing barriers and changing attitudes and behaviors. NIYF triggers societal engagement and transition, incorporating political values, negotiating responsibilities and unlock-ing action potentials, thus addressing the need for studies that include diverse interests and stimulate sharing responsibilities.

NIYF is transdisciplinary in nature by combining social science, humanities (art), and environmental science, and involves a large group of local and national stakeholders. This provides new, participative models of local governance for the path towards carbon neutrality.

Raising engagement: climate change, eco-visualization and climate art

There is a robust body of literature indicating why global climate change is difficult for humans to ad-dress: In climate change causes and effects are dissociated in time and space; the climate system is highly complex and non-linear; climate change manifests in events that humans have been dealing with for thousands of years (e.g., floods, droughts, etc.); the magnitude of the issue makes individuals feel inca-pable of taking meaningful actions; the issue is communicated in a way not emotionally relevant. Behavioral lock-ins, practices, and strong routines prevent people from taking the radical changes of life-styles that would be needed. At the same time, a growing focus in behavioral science has been on nudg-ing and gamification techniques.

The attractiveness of these approaches might be due to their limited invasiveness into people’s lives and low political implementation costs. Although such approaches de-serve their place in the climate policy toolbox, we strongly contest that the fast and fundamental shift of lifestyles and societies can be achieved by such measures alone. We argue that people need to step or be pushed out of their comfort zones to become creative and – together with other people – develop, nego-tiate, and implement radically new solutions.

Four cases with Quantified results: mobility, housing, food and plastic

NIYF builds on a comparative study of four cases to demonstrate that the methodological approach is applicable in different domains. Mobility, Housing, Food and Plastic (Neutrality). 
NIYF quantifies the CO2 emission reduction effects achieved in each of the cases by state-of-the-art Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) based environmental scenario analyses, also assessing the upscaling potential.

Taking the engagement further – vision workshops

Project organization, management and partners

Advisory board members: Professor John Fraser, Associate professor Frances Sprei, Professor Kelly Fielding and Professor Wander Jager.