LocationsFrom Sensing to Acting: Why We Turned to Behavioural Insights to Support Climate Action in Iraq
December 1, 2022
The UNDP Accelerator Lab in Iraq, had already spent time “sensing and exploring” climate challenges from a local perspective: using Mission 1.5 to understand how people think about climate policy, mapping stakeholders, applying systems thinking, and even running a “Future of Climate in Iraq” exhibition to surface community priorities and weak signals. Through this work, we found that abundant efforts were focused on policies and high-level advocacy, while far fewer endavours targeted changing everyday behaviour – what people do at home, in the field, at work, or online.
My interest in behavioural insights was sparked when I took part in a regional UNDP training and hands-on experimentation process on behavioural insights with Behavioural Insights Teamand AccLab Iraq contributed to the Behavioural Insights Toolkit for Entrepreneurship Programming. That experience made it very clear how small design choices, cognitive biases, and system-level frictions quietly shape people’s decisions – and it convinced me that the same lens could, and should, be applied to how Iraqis engage with climate change in their daily lives.
That interest in the nexus of behavioural insights and climate action pushed us at the UNDP Accelerator Lab to design an initiative, “Step 4 Climate”, in partnership with Humat Dijlah NGO, specifically around behaviour:
How can we use behavioural insights to understand what really moves Iraqis to act on climate change?
Listening to Behaviour, Not Assumptions
The first phase of Step4Climate was a data collection exercise. We designed a questionnaire and interviews to understand how different stakeholders perceive climate change, what they see as priority issues, and how they think individuals can (or cannot) make a difference. Stakeholder mapping of influential actors in climate action was conducted, and more than 100 responses came from the public sector, private sector and SMEs, academia and researchers, local NGOs, international NGOs and donors, and media and social influencers.
The data collection results were structured in a report focusing on existing behavioural approaches to tackle climate change in Iraq. The report maps the main actors in the environmental sustainability ecosystem, analyses their current climate-related activities and behavioral interventions, and examines how much individuals and institutions know and do about climate change in their daily practices and how is that reflected in individual behaviour. It compares approaches across government, private sector, academia, MSMEs and startups, local NGOs, international organizations, and social media influencers, highlighting both promising practices and critical gaps. The report closes with concrete recommendations and next steps for using behavioural insights more strategically in climate policies, programmes, and public campaigns in Iraq.
The main findings and insights from the data collection process – including the survey, interviews and the report – were that: there is a lot of climate work, but not much aimed at behaviours; respondents acknowledged strong efforts by government institutions and organizations but highlighted a weak focus on influencing individual behaviours and daily habits. Moreover, climate activities tend to target “awareness” more than action, focusing on workshops, lectures, and sharing information, with less emphasis on practical behavioural nudges or incentives that make eco-friendly choices easier, more attractive, or more rewarding.
Another finding stood out, individual behaviour is seen as important but under-leveraged; respondents agreed that personal habits matter – from waste and plastic use to how we deal with water and trees – but felt this potential is not being strategically used to confront climate change.
The survey also helped us identify which environmental problems people believed individual behaviour could meaningfully influence inlcuding desertification and the loss of tree cover, excessive plastic use and the lack of waste separation and recycling, and water scarcity and pollution; these became our behavioural entry points.
Co-Designing with the Community
We didn’t want to interpret the data alone from behind our screens. So, we co-designed with stakeholders and organized “Step4Climate Workshop”, inviting more than 50 actors working in environment and climate: local NGOs, government officials, youth groups, media, and activists. The aim was to validate and deepen the survey findings, drilling down into how behaviour shows up in desertification, waste, and water issues, to prioritize five key challenges where positive individual behaviour could realistically make a dent – with desertification emerging as a top concern and a strong candidate for experimentation – and to map priority target groups.
A key insight, from a behavioural lens, was that this workshop shifted the climate conversation from “What should the government do?” to “What would it take for people to adopt new habits – and what stands in their way?” Participants also proposed innovative ways to use social media and storytelling to shift behaviour, rather than only broadcasting information, mainly focusing on the power of visual storytelling to show the future consequences of today’s behaviours and doing so through leveraging influencers to normalize eco-friendly habits as part of Iraqi identity.
Influencers as Agents for Behavioural Change – The Anti-Desertification Campaign
With desertification prioritized and behavioural levers in hand, we moved into experimentation.
We designed a short, six-week Instagram campaign under Step4Climate focused on one core idea: if we want to fight desertification, we need to make “planting and protecting trees” a visible, aspirational social norm – and make “cutting trees” socially unacceptable.
We collaborated with influencers to launch the Anti-Desertification campaign focusing on content creation, using short videos, visuals, interactive questions, polls, and clear calls to action for people to plant or protect trees. One of the main channels for the campaign was influencer Yousif Al-Fahad, and every post was built on behavioural principles: tapping into Iraqi identity and pride, making tree planting a visible social norm, turning “desertification” into concrete, local actions, and prioritising interaction over one-way messaging. The result was strong engagement and, more importantly, real-time behavioural data on what messages worked, where resistance showed up, and how quickly interest drops without follow-up. It wasn’t a full communication strategy; it was a deliberate behavioural sandbox to test what moves people.
The findings from this work showed us that many Iraqis already know that climate change is real, and that the environment is deteriorating. The gap is between knowing and doing. That’s where behavioural insights, nudges, and better-designed experiences come in. To incentivize “doing”, we anchored messaging in Iraqi landscapes, rivers, palm trees, and shared memories, which made engagement more emotional and genuine. Behavioural change sticks better when it feels like protecting “who we are”, not just following global trends.
What’s Next: Scaling Behavioural Insights in Climate Action
Climate change in Iraq is structural and political. But it is also behavioural. If we ignore the behavioural dimension, we will keep designing projects that look good on paper and under-deliver in real life.
The work we started with Step4Climate, and the behavioural sensing initiative is not a one-off project; it’s a direction of travel. UNDP is now integrating behavioural diagnostics into climate project design from the start and building partnerships with local NGOs, creatives, and influencers who understand how to communicate with communities in ways that resonate with their values and identities.
Step4Climate was exactly what its name suggests: one step. A small, intentional step towards treating Iraqis not just as observers of climate change, but as everyday decision-makers whose behaviours, collectively, can either accelerate the crisis – or help bend its trajectory.