How to Save the World | The Psychology & Science of Environmental Behavior

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT - THE SCHOOL OF CLIMATE ACTION DESIGN STARTS JUNE 14 2025! 🎉🌱 JOIN THE WAITLIST 👉https://waitlist.helloworlde.com/action-schoolIn this never-before community co-design coaching program, I will be teaching everything I know about building an engagement funnel that signs up and converts thousands of people to your cause. In this episode, I share the structure and tech of my signature 6-step engagement funnel system I use to successfully attract and sign up hundreds of people a day.

Explore the creation of high-resolution urban heat island maps in collaboration with NASA JPL, using thermal satellite pictures, GIS software, and machine learning. Learn about integrating thermal data with parcel information, NASA's innovative approach, and the use of Mapbox for environmental interventions. Discover the importance of combating urban heat islands and transforming cities into green spaces using thermal photography and environmental data.

Learn the secret to building your mission: start with a funnel. Explore funnels in behavior change and marketing, design innovative funnel concepts, integrate marketing strategies early, and master funnel design for environmental action with free courses.

In this episode, I explain the precise definition of how I see gamification. It's essentially tracking progress towards a goal, and rewarding people for making progress. This episode is a neat nugget of the core measurement-driven gamification principles you can use for making climate and environmental action happen. Get my free Climate Action Design Tips: https://helloworlde.com/actiontips * * * How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product. Get inspired with positive eco futures art prints, organic t-shirts, hoodies, calendars, and all Katie's action design training at ⁠⁠⁠ecopiastore.com⁠⁠⁠ Sign up for Katie's free behavior and gamification design course at ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com⁠⁠ Join Gamify the Planet masterclass training in climate action design for $25/month ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com/gamifytheplanet⁠⁠ Get a copy of the book, How to Save the World on Amazon ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/2Z4jivL⁠⁠ Follow Katie on: Instagram ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/katiepatrickhello/ LinkedIn ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-patrick/ Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/katiepatrick/message

Did you know that the vast majority of environmental professionals have NO training in the job they are hired to do? That's the job of human influence. Environmental scientists, engineers, and lawyers are often hired for the job of influencing thousands of people to take action to meet sustainability goals, yet our training is in, well, science, engineering, and law - not the psychology of change. This means most of us working on environmental change make big mistakes when trying to influence people - and we don't realize it. This goes all the way up the food chain to major NGOs and government departments that are spending millions of dollars on campaigns that hardly move the needle. The science of human persuasion and social change requires an entirely different skill set. In the episode, I share the top 10 big mistakes I see most environmental advocates making, from the lens of evidence-based environmental psychology and my 20 years designing environmental change tools for some of the biggest (and smallest) environmental movements on the planet. Get my free Climate Action Design Tips: ⁠https://helloworlde.com/actiontips⁠ * * * How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product. Get inspired with positive eco futures art prints, organic t-shirts, hoodies, calendars, and all Katie's action design training at ⁠⁠⁠ecopiastore.com⁠⁠⁠ Sign up for Katie's free behavior and gamification design course at ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com⁠⁠ Join Gamify the Planet masterclass training in climate action design for $25/month ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com/gamifytheplanet⁠⁠ Get a copy of the book, How to Save the World on Amazon ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/2Z4jivL⁠⁠ Follow Katie on: Instagram ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/katiepatrickhello/ LinkedIn ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-patrick/ Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/katiepatrick/message

In this podcast, the host discusses the three common mistakes made when trying to motivate people to help the planet. Instead, she presents the five major levers of human motivation, including goals, rewards, social comparison, and human imitation. The power of social diffusion and group identity in motivating human behavior is explored, highlighting the importance of trust and commitment devices. The chapter also emphasizes the need for a detailed process for environmental behavior change, utilizing evidence-based techniques to tap into the human mind.

In today's episode, I introduce a new endeavor I've been secretly burrowing away at. It's called ECOPIA and it's my ultimate dream project. ECOPIA's mission is to create child-centric properties that are built and designed for families to raise children together, as it's meant to be done, in groups (and with all the eco-friendly, zero-emissions, zero-waste features an apartment could need!) Modern parenting is deeply broken. Parents are more burned out, lonely, and stressed than ever before. Childcare is painfully expensive. The systems for daycare, play-dates, maternal support, afterschool care, and activities are profoundly inefficient. What should be the happiest moments of a parent's life are often steamrolled by stressful duties we could design around: near-constant death prevention (cars, falls, poisons, sharp things, running off etc) and being a daily taxi service. Parenting is hard, largely, because the architecture is broken. Suburban homes were made for a different time when housing was cheap, marriages were conventional, and women had an average of four children – all of whom could play together in a backyard. Alternatively, apartments are built cheaply for profit - not for kids or mothers. By taking a child-centric lens to apartment buildings, we can create supportive communities that center around safe places for children to play in groups with the amenities that parents need. They say "It takes a village" for a reason. It does. That's why I'm putting my best effort forward to build the village we've always needed. Learn more about ECOPIA at https://ecopia.us and sign up to join the waitlist for future residents, building partners, and developers. * * * How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product. Get inspired with positive eco futures art prints, organic t-shirts, hoodies, calendars, and all Katie's action design training at ⁠⁠⁠ecopiastore.com⁠⁠⁠ Sign up for Katie's free behavior and gamification design course at ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com⁠⁠ Join Gamify the Planet masterclass training in climate action design for $25/month ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com/gamifytheplanet⁠⁠ Get a copy of the book, How to Save the World on Amazon ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/2Z4jivL⁠⁠ Follow Katie on: Instagram ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/katiepatrickhello/ LinkedIn ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-patrick/ ---Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/katiepatrick/message

How do you know that your project is REALLY changing what you want to change in the world? And how do you know if you are doing it effectively? In this episode, I share the core mechanism of what change is. This is such a fundamental primary principle that we tend not to see it. You MUST have these three axioms active for change to happen. If you don't, then no change is occuring. Unfortunately, most environmental projects fail at one or all three of the axioms and invest much time and effort with no change occuring. If you build your ideas and campaigns up from these three core principles - and you need all three in a trifecta - you'll shoot right to the center of what you need to do. Get my free Climate Action Design Tips: ⁠https://helloworlde.com/actiontips⁠ * * * How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product. Get inspired with positive eco futures art prints, organic t-shirts, hoodies, calendars, and all Katie's action design training at ⁠⁠⁠ecopiastore.com⁠⁠⁠ Sign up for Katie's free behavior and gamification design course at ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com⁠⁠ Join Gamify the Planet masterclass training in climate action design for $25/month ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com/gamifytheplanet⁠⁠ Get a copy of the book, How to Save the World on Amazon ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/2Z4jivL⁠⁠ Follow Katie on: Instagram ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/katiepatrickhello/ LinkedIn ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-patrick/ ---Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/katiepatrick/message

In today’s episode, we chat with behavioral and environmental psychologist, Dr Reuven Sussman, head of the Behavior and Health Program at The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE). He conducts research about, and advocates for, energy efficiency in buildings and transportation - a sector that makes up the lion's share of carbon emissions. Dr Sussman is an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and currently sits on the editorial board of The Journal of Environmental Psychology and The Journal of Social Psychology.  We dive into his recent paper he authored titled “Context and Meaningfulness in Energy Efficiency Labeling for Real Estate Listings”  which explores the real nitty gritty of how to get home energy labels to work and exactly how to design them. We discuss the psychological foundations of how people respond to these labels, the kind of policy that is required to get them going, and how they can best be used to influence the real estate market to decarbonize buildings and drive greener choices. We also talk about another important concept called “framing” which is a technique that can be used to help sell the often tricker and more demanding energy efficiency upgrades to homeowners. * * * How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product. Get inspired with positive eco futures art prints, organic t-shirts, hoodies, calendars, and all Katie's action design training at ⁠⁠ecopiastore.com⁠⁠ Sign up for Katie's free behavior and gamification design course at ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com⁠⁠ Join Gamify the Planet masterclass training in climate action design for $25/month ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com/gamifytheplanet⁠⁠ Get a copy of the book, How to Save the World on Amazon ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/2Z4jivL⁠⁠  Follow Katie on:  Instagram ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/katiepatrickhello/ LinkedIn ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-patrick/

In this episode, I share the four social-science-backed reasons for why you need to be heavily immersed in images of the positive eco future you are working to create. We'll cover the psychology of motivation, technical problem-solving, leadership, and systems-change. This epsides explores the deeper reasons why I put together the new Ecopia Store at ecopiastore.com where you can purchase art prints, hoodies, t-shirts, and calendars that show positive eco-futures. For years, I've struggled to get access to high quality environmental reimagings of cities. I started creating an abundance of my own in MidJurney and have selected favorites available as prints on the new Ecopia Store. These images aren't just inpsiring and fun; they are critical ingredients to building your own energy and building social movements of change. It's the green "I have a dream" speech and it's fundamental to rolling out change. Get a copy of the hugely popular 2024 Positive Eco Futures Wall Calendar at ecopiastore.com * * * How to Save the World is a podcast about the psychology of what gets people to do eco-behaviors and take climate action: Environmental engineer, designer, and author, Katie Patrick, hunts down the latest behavioral science literature from top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford to unearth the evidence-based teachings you can use to rapidly get more people to adopt your environmental campaign, program, or product. Sign up for Katie's free behavior and gamification design course at ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com⁠⁠ Get inspired with positive eco futures art prints, organic t-shirts, hoodies, calendars and all Katie's action design trainings at ⁠ecopiastore.com⁠ Join Gamify the Planet masterclass training in climate action design for $25/month ⁠⁠http://katiepatrick.com/gamifytheplanet⁠⁠ Get a copy of the book, How to Save the World on Amazon ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/2Z4jivL ⁠⁠ Follow Katie on: Instagram ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/katiepatrickhello/ LinkedIn ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-patrick/ ---Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/katiepatrick/message