The European Green Deal is the European Commission’s vision of how to achieve climate neutrality and reverse the loss of biodiversity. The changes in the economy and society that the implementation of this vision will bring have been called the green transition in Estonian.

The green transition is a term expected to be familiar to the average citizen, but its meaning remains elusive to many. Without understanding what this concept entails, it is difficult for the average citizen to understand what it will change in their life, and even more difficult to translate it into concrete actions that it requires of them.

The goal of the project is to understand how people living in Estonia think about the green transition to find the best ways to increase awareness and change everyday practices in society.

The project contributes to the following:

  • leaders of the green transition, understanding the factors that shape people’s environmental behaviour, make policy choices that are effective in shaping human behaviour, but also recognise people’s individual development plans and competing needs to change their behaviour;
  • public discussion about the needs of the green transition in Estonia’s development directions can be held constructively, creatively and by preventing destructive opposition;
  • communication is given a role in shaping human behaviour, for which it is suitable, taking into account the characteristics and interactions of other tools suitable for other interventions;
  • how to measure people’s coming along with the green transition or the development of the factors that support it, it is possible to measure it in a way that makes scientific sense but provides applied knowledge
  • the way how people are coming along with the green transition or how the factors that support it are developing, is assessable in a scientifically meaningful way that provides applied knowledge as well.

The project will be carried out in three stages:

  • an anthropological study, where the main purpose is to understand how the green transition is placed in the context of people’s daily lives and how it relates to their understandings, principles, expectations and fears;
  • development of interdisciplinary behavioural science solutions in different formats;
  • creating a behaviour change toolbox that can be used to plan and implement behavioural interventions and solutions to help achieve the goals of the green transition.

The work is carried out by a consortium, which includes Think Tank Praxis, the Center for Applied Anthropology, University of Tartu and Tallinn University.