An Overview Of Our Solution
It’s generally recognized that increasing the number of individuals that alter their behavior in favor of reducing carbon emissions is a core component of succeeding in controlling global climate change. However, achieving significant behavioral change in larger portions of the general public is challenging. Two larger studies indicate that around 79% of the population are only moderately - or not at all - altering their behavior in response to climate change. Achieving public climate engagement is difficult, and it’s recognized that traditional one-way communication on its own is fairly ineffective for altering individual behavior. The motivation behind Ducky is the recognition that controlling global climate change cannot be done through technology improvements or policy change alone – it’s also essential to change behavior specifically at the individual level.
- Population Impacted: We've directly impacted 5,400 people
- Continent: Europe
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Context Analysis
Today, 4 out of 5 people are not motivated to live more sustainable, lacking information on what they can do and the proper tools to measure their personal impact. The global dimension of climate change makes it difficult to identify what are effective actions, how to implement them into everyday life and to get feedback about both the individual and collective effect. This calls for efforts to link climate science and individual impact closer together.
Traditional climate communication has, with a dissociation of causes and effects in time and space, made it difficult for the public to relate to it - making it difficult for individuals to see that their actions really matter. Moreover, 86% of employees believe it’s important that their own employer is responsible for the society and the environment - a very challenging issue to both demonstrate and measure, especially for larger corporations.
Describe the technical solution you wanted the target audience to adopt
Ducky is an easy-to-use climate engagement platform helping realizing the societal goal of reducing climate change by effective, large-scale mobilization of individuals. It enables anyone to visualize how their carbon footprint is impacted by daily activities, and get personalized advice on how tolerable lifestyle changes reduces their footprint. Ducky directly embeds best practices for successful alteration of climate behavior - data collection, feedback, gamification and community-based approaches - in a complete, interactive web-progressive app, built on campaigns and competitions, where anyone can log and track their everyday climate-friendly activities and see direct climate impact of such actions. The feedback element expands beyond KGCO2e saved, with “Ducky points” that users get for sharing experiences, influencing others and giving endorsements to each other. In this way, Ducky measures not only environmental impact of everyday actions, but also social impact via influencing.
Type of intervention
Describe your behavioral intervention
Ducky is specifically helping changing habits on the individual level. Users are invited to calculate their personal carbon footprint and encouraged to reduce it in a Climate Challenge. We measure users impact in KgCO2e within four main categories: food, transport, consumption/purchase and energy by using consumption based calculations. Some of the climate activities are: walk/bike to work, taking shorter showers, but also buying second hand products - all activities encouraging individuals to adopt sustainable practices and integrate sustainable consumption into their lifestyles. Ducky supports the entire before-after process from measuring users personal "footprint" to reducing it by changing habits, and also increasing "handprint", as a result of influencing others.
Ducky works with climate psychologists to get a better understanding of what drives environmentally friendly behavior. If you recycle you are likely to feel that this is important for the climate, so this behavior encourages good environmental attitudes. Influences from other people are also important to us. If your neighbors acknowledge your outdoor compost, they are more likely to choose the same, especially if you communicate the benefits. Our ability to make climate friendly choices are affected by our environment. You are more likely to change your habits if it’s easy to do and the benefits are obvious. If maintaining an outdoor compost is too much work, you are less likely to start composting.
As needed, please explain the type of intervention in more detail
Ducky reminds people once a day to do a climate-friendly action, a feature that's being continually developed to help decision making. Every challenge has an overall goal, but everyone is encouraged to do even more climate actions with milestones reached with CO2e reduced. It inspires people on an emotional level by instilling pride and motivation through positive/easy climate communication (Per Espen Stoknes), fun superhero themed graphics and illustrations on an engagement platform giving you a game-like experience making sustainability fun/enjoyable. Ducky is team-based, motivating users to be great team members with a transparent news feed and giving them environment to create "a climate hype" by boosting climate communication.
Describe your implementation
Ducky approaches established communities - companies, organizations and schools - that are already embarking on a sustainable journey to change individual behavior. These communities are aware of the importance of sustainability, thus becoming climate ambassadors to influence other communities along the way.
We address the identified problems by visualizing and measuring both direct and indirect climate impact, using country-specific and consumption based climate data and making climate science and individual impact closer to the public. Identifying and empowering key ambassadors within already established communities drives the implementation and engagement of Ducky forward.
To further promote success and boost the engagement, we provide customers with visual prompts in the physical environments, such as live-screens for ongoing Climate Challenges. To prevent failure and increase engagement, users are provided with assistance before every Climate Challenge kicks off. In this way, we are able to onboard entire teams beforehand. Moreover, we make sure our users fully understand what their impact actually means, by making CO2 savings less abstract. To enable such functionality, we use "Ducky Translate" where we turn CO2 numbers into trees, trips, food&drinks etc. Further more, research suggests rewarding system which is based more on reinforcement effect. For example, CO2 savings of a winning team equals a company donation to help society become more sustainable. In this way, companies & organizations create environment for impact, influencing their customers/supporters
Ducky argues that nudging individuals toward pro-social behaviors, like climate engagement, should be less punitive and more cost-efficient than regulations and traditional climate communication alone. It draws attention to what each of us are actually doing, rather than what we perceive others to be doing, and this justifies a new approach leaning heavily on transparency and co-ownership.
External connections
Ducky has a strong community presence in Norway and a strong network with several organizations promoting sustainability and connecting Ducky with larger corporations. Examples are Climate-KIC (the EU’s main climate innovation initiative), Innovation Norway (the Norwegian Government’s most important instrument for innovation and development of Norwegian enterprises and industry), Norway 203040 Coalition (a coalition of some of the largest corporations working together toward Norway’s climate target).
We’re actively collaborating with well-respected experts and institutions assisting the development and delivery of the platform, services and business in terms of workshops, projects, feedback, mentoring and expertise. As a result, we were mentioned last autumn at TED Global as one of solutions for climate communication. The Ducky Advisory board is:
• Per Espen Stoknes, PhD. Stoknes is a Researcher at the Department of Law and Governance of BI Norwegian Business School. His expertise relevant to Ducky is within economics, climate, behaviour and Green Growth.
• Gøril Forbord, Business Developer at Trønder Energi.
• Berit M. Alvestrand, Senior Designer at Eggs Design.
• Tommy Dahlen, Attorney-at-law and Partner at Arntzen de Besche.
• Peter Bakkeid, Specialist in Lean Methodology.
We also collaborate with key independent expert advisers and academic institutions, such as the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and encourage open source development.
Who adopted the desired behaviors and to what degree?
The pilot for the School Climate Championship in 2017 was evaluated in collaboration with Trøndersk Klimaråd (Governmental Institution), Sosiologisk Poliklinikk (Research Institution) and Ducky. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. Students were asked to answer questions covering their attitudes toward environment and climate, habits and educational questions.
The project was joined by 1,689 students from 22 High Schools in 2017, doing a total of 88,639 climate activities resulting in 103,530KG of CO2 saved. The studies showed a 32% increase in number of actions students did before and after the Climate Championship. The project was valued a success, having a positive impact on the students relationship toward climate and sustainability. Students reported that they’ve become more interested in the climate, & have done more during this period than what they would’ve if they didn’t participate. The biggest challenge was to remember to log activities outside of school.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
Our most recent projects (2018), have enrolled a total of 627 participants - and the platform demonstrates an average efficiency per person in reducing daily CO2 by about 6 kg CO2 equivalents (kg CO2e). The average Norwegian has an annual footprint of 13,650 tons of CO2, but if the average participant did the same as they did in the Ducky campaigns throughout the entire year, their potential footprint reduction would be a whooping 15,18% annually.
In terms of what can realistically be expected for persons living in normal, demanding day-to-day situations, achieving an average reduction in individual footprint of about 15% per person is very strong. As market adoption grows and we get an increasingly larger and engaged user base, these 15% will start making a measurable impact on the world’s overall climate emissions. Initially, following our planned growth, these campaigns are estimated to entail aggregated reductions of around 5 million tonnes CO2 by 2020.
What were some of the resulting co-benefits?
Users of Ducky are reflecting on their Climate Footprint, joining Climate Challenges at home, work and school and have started to alter their behaviors by eating less meat, having shorter showers, biking more etc. All of these activities have an equally important impact on elements such as water use, land area use, biodiversity and more, but the most important impact is social. In a classroom or a workspace, you are triggered to think about what you can do as a student or co-worker to create larger impact. Today, this happens organically, but we’re now developing an Educational Package aiming to introduce sustainability as a core part of high school education. It‘ll be tested on 25 High Schools in Norway in autumn 2018. At the same time, we are inspiring workers to use sustainability engagement created in a Ducky Challenge to generate ideas for how their company can contribute to the SDGs, and inspire future business opportunities.
Sustainability
Ducky is a B2B/G2G engagement platform, offering subscription packages to clients at a current price of 13 EUR/Employee/Challenge with a yearly subscription. Ducky's current primary revenue source is campaign projects, with a supplementary revenue and funding sources from: a)consulting on sustainability strategy for organizations, b) sales of platform and API licenses for OEM use of the Ducky platform (branded with customer name), and c) as participants in research projects. With our ideal clients being larger companies with sustainability strategies in place and employee engagement programs established, our customer base is very big. Counting all companies with more than 250 employees, Norway alone had in 2017 more than 740 large companies
Return on investment
The cost of implementing Norwegian Climate Data was 25,000EUR, 16% of total income so far. It’s expected for Ducky to see big returns on investments made with the scaling of the service. Investments in climate data, development, design and organizational structure can easily be replicated to a global market with only minor adjustments. But the greatest investment Ducky has made is in its employees. Until now, Ducky has been largely moved by a group of highly dedicated employees with the common purpose, reaching a sustainable planet. Employees have dedicated their time and expertise to Ducky without getting a full compensation. The company is highly purpose-driven, and is nurturing a flat hierarchy structure where everyone is a leader.
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
Ducky is a highly scalable service working toward realizing its full potential as a worldwide climate engagement platform. To achieve this, we need a multi-language version of Ducky, adapted to specific emissions and behavioral contexts of several other countries. Ducky will establish an International Office by 2019, working with distributors nationally and internationally. So far, our sales processes have typically been long-running and resource-intensive. To be able to scale into global markets, it is imperative that we improve our sales processes and build relationships with relevant, local distributors. Building relationships with key stakeholders is our motivation for establishing local sales offices in other countries. A study conducted in collaboration with Asplan Viak shows that we can have global climate data in place within 6 months, costing approx. 150,000 EUR, distributed to internal development and external consultancy fees.