NATIONAL ACTION PLAN ON CLIMATE CHANGE

GOVERNMENT OF INDIA

PRIME MINISTER'S COUNCIL ON CLIMATE CHANGE

CONTENTS

1 Overview
2 Principles
3 Approach
4 Way Forward: Eight National Missions
· National Solar Mission
· National Mission for Enhanced Energy
Efficiency
· National Mission on Sustainable Habitat
· National Water Mission
· National Mission for Sustaining the

Himalayan Ecosystem
· National Mission for a "Green India"
· National Mission for Sustainable
Agriculture
· National Mission on Strategic

Knowledge for Climate Change

5 Implementation of Missions:
 National Action Plan on Climate Change

NATIONAL ACTION PLAN ON CLIMATE CHANGE • 3

1. Overview
Climate change may alter the distribution and
quality of India's natural resources and adverse-
ly affect the livelihood of its people. With an
economy closely tied to its natural resource base
and climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture,
water and forestry, India may face a major
threat because of the projected changes in
climate. India is faced with the challenge of
sustaining its rapid economic growth while
dealing with the global threat of climate change.
This threat emanates from accumulated
greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere,
anthropogenically generated through long-term
and intensive industrial growth and high
consumption lifestyles in developed countries.
Climate change is anthropogenic - the product of
billions of acts of daily consumption. That
solutions need to be anthropogenic too is well
accepted. Yet, suggested solutions are normally
cast in the realms of finance and technology,
often neglecting the primal root of the problem:
individual behavior. An emerging body of
social-psychology scholarship has examined the
barriers and drivers of individual behavior in
relation to both adaptation and mitigation. This
paper reviews some of its conclusions, and
suggests policy areas that should be considered
in devising appropriate interventions.
While businesses, large organizations, and
governments certainly must implement
enormous changes to their current approach to
climate action, individuals lie at the heart of true
societal transformations. Individuals have
significant agency over their behavior in the
areas of transport and mobility, heating, and
diet. With the support of a number of policy
changes from governments, climate news and
research can influence behaviors in a way that
helps drive climate action and sustainability.
education is imperative to behavioral influence.
Campaigns to change behaviors should
therefore employ this at their core, instead of
4 • NATIONAL ACTION PLAN ON CLIMATE CHANGE
seeking to criticise or vilify people with little
understanding of climate change.
Distance in both proximity and time to the
effects of climate change is vital to how we view
the looming threat. Most people live a long way
from the melting glaciers we hear about
A better approach to inspiring people to change
their behavior is education. Education on the
benefits of change empowers people to make
decisions that they feel are in their best interest
rather than being forced into it by others
To successfully influence our behavioral
approach to climate change, we need to change
how we communicate when we talk or write
about climate change. By cultivating positive
emotions associated with climate actions rather
than negative emotions coming from climate
impacts or news, we can begin to make the
necessary changes to our behavior. . Researchers
identify three key areas of high emissions that
behavior change could significantly improve.
They are mobility, diet, and heating.
If we are to meet our targets, however,
individuals’ behaviors must become a much
larger focus. The report suggests that Behavior
change is an opportunity to make new goals and
positive changes. In changing a behavior,
making an action plan is an important step in
getting started.  An action plan sets the stage for
achieving goals; it gives you a timetable of
necessary steps to reach your goal.  There are
four strategies in behavior change that can help
an individual achieve their goal
1 – Specific, short-term
The first step in making an action plan is setting
a specific, short-term goal
2 - Actionable
An actionable goal is one targeted to a behavior
that an individual has direct control over 
3 – Confidence
An individual should only set goals that they are
confident in achieving. Achieving such a goal
raises the individual’s self-confidence about
their ability to successfully perform the
behaviors needed for that goal.
4 - Cues-to-action
Cues-to-action can be thought of as an event or
stimulus that triggers an individual to do a
specific behavior.

NATIONAL ACTION PLAN ON CLIMATE CHANGE • 5

2. Principles
Changing our habits is fundamental to tackling
the enormous challenge we are faced with
Climate change. Behavioral science shines a
light on why we think and act a certain way, and
why our individual behaviors are not where we
need them to be to mitigate the climate change.
Changing an individual’s behavior is
essential to lessen the impacts of climate
change. In order to achieve a targets on climate
change, policies for behavioral change is require
introduce in the state level action plan, where it
can be best informed by two strategies. Firstly,
policies should enable an individual to take
specific actions that lead to emissions reductions
and, secondly, they should create a wider
context that focuses more on public engagement
. This isn’t just another list of green behaviors.
Solutions are only as good as their adoption; we
need a methodology to put great ideas into
action. Given the urgency and rapid pace of
climate change, we need new strategies for
effecting behavior change. Applying behavioral
science tools, such as appealing to people’s
emotions, leveraging social norms, and
influencing decision-making environments, is
one promising path for the more sustainable use
of natural resources and curbing climate change
impacts.Accordingly, an Action Plan to
introduce behavioral change for Climate
Change will be guided by the following
principles:
1. Applying behavioral insights- APPEALING
TO EMOTION
Emotions are often much more powerful than
reason. An emerging body of research provides
evidence that the anticipation of future emotional
or ‘affective’ states plays a powerful role in
shaping behavior, especially when these
emotional states involve feelings of pride and
guilt. The history of evidence points to different
tactics, such as highlighting one’s feelings of
pride or joy as a result of sustainable behavior,
and shows that these can produce stronger pro-
environmental behavioral intentions.
Messaging and other interventions that appeal to
specific emotions and feelings can engage the
powerful centers of the brain that are often
responsible for decisions. Using emotional
appeals can speed up the adoption of behaviors
and practices that yield benefits for both the
consumer and the environment. Emotions can be
a powerful force for change, because climate
impacts often feel so detached from individual
actions and seem far-off or distant in the future,
changing unsustainable behaviors is particularly
challenging.
2 Applying behavioral insights- PROVIDING
SOCIAL INCENTIVES
Humans are social animals. Human nature has a
propensity for cooperation because we like to be
part of a group, and many of our identities
emerge from associating with others. Because of
NATIONAL ACTION PLAN ON CLIMATE CHANGE • 6
this, we also care about our reputation and how
it compares to the status of others in our group.
Social incentives and norms can thus be
powerful motivators for behavior. They can
provide cues for members of a group on how to
behave, and they also add considerable pressure
to change behavior and conform when behavior
deviates from expected norms. Similarly,
research on modeling and social proof show us
that we tend to follow the behavioral lead of
those we feel are like us or we admire.
Changing social norms around consumption
behavior is a commonly employed intervention
in environmental fields. Personalized Normative
Feedback (PNF) is an approach that is used to
provide individuals with information about
themselves as well as their peers in an attempt
to highlight how an individual or group’s
behavior deviates from the norm.This approach
works by making the behaviors of a particular
social group more obvious, which then can
promote opportunities for members of that
group to cooperate and reciprocate rather than
compete. Social norms and providing social
incentives can encourage water and energy
conservation.
3 Applying behavioral insights- DESIGNING
FOR CHOICE ARCHITECTURE
An understanding of the nuances of human
decision-making and its tendency to defy
expectations of rationality informs this behavior
change strategy.
Designing for choice architecture is one
approach that acknowledges these insights about
human behavior by creating an optimal decision-
making environment. Related interventions take
account of the fact that there are a multitude of
forces at work when we decide how to behave in
a situation.
Solutions that employ thoughtful choice
architecture will simplify what we are asked to
do,reduce the apparent number of choices we
have, and frame decisions in a way that guide us
towards desired behavior.195 This approach will
also successfully capture our limited attention by
prompting us and reminding us at the right time,
which is often when we are in transition and
more likely to break our habits. We can draw on
our earlier descriptions of nudging and boosting
as two ways to help design environments and
people’s relationships with their environments to
manage decision points. Below are examples of
changing the choice architecture for printing and
dining and how two simple insights can yield
significant changes in human behavior that are
beneficial for the environment.
3.Action Points of programme on work of
Behavior Change
1 Applying behavioral insights — Social
incentives- AGRICULTURE AND LAND
MANAGEMENT,
Applying behavioral change in adopting these
regenerative agricultural practices: compost
application, cover crops, crop rotation, green it reduces emissions from packaging,
manures, no-till or reduced tillage, and/or transportation and production.
organic production: Due to close farming
networks, when one farmer makes a change to 1. Applying behavioral insights -
their practices, it can have a ripple effect in the TRANSPORTATION :
whole community.
2.Applying behavioral insights —ENERGY Applying behavioral change in encouraging
AND MATERIALS: public transportation for commuting in cities
Applying behavioral change in adopting instead of individual vehicles. The proliferation
renewable energy and consumption of of transportation mobile apps, biking and
household energy are the most effective targets. walking paths, and increasingly efficient and
Rooftop solar, Solar ware heater, LED lights, reliable forms of mass transit are making low-
smart thermoset, house hold recycling system , carbon options preferable.
home energy audit and retrofits , becoming a
more readily available option for communities
4. Approach
around the globe, and with that comes feelings
of autonomy and pride. Solar energy is bringing
Concerns of the country through a directional
electricity to rural communities to create new
education, health, and business opportunities shift in the human’s behavior , including
while at the same time helping urban ones rely through the enhancement of the current
less on fossil fuels. and planned programmes presented in this
3. Applying behavioral insights-Food Habit and section.
throw out habit : The Action Plan on changing behavior for
Climate Change identifies measures that
Applying behavioral change in Food promote our common objectives while also
production, dietary changes , plat reach diet, yielding co-benefits for addressing climate
reducing food wastes, and must can be done to change effectively. It outlines a number of
family’s disposable habits. Reduce and Reuse steps to simultaneously advance human’s
can have a lasting impact on the environment. behavior to climate change-related objectives
To reduce, plan carefully and buy only what you of adaptation and mitigation.
need. Buying less stuff not only saves money, While applying behavior change tools to climate
change action , need to understand what
influence behavior that the social and behavioral
sciences tell us are particularly promising to
inspire and enable behavior change for climate
change.
4.1 Behavior change Concept
A)Understanding human behavior
The theory of behavior that has guided much of
existing policy is the well-known ‘rational
choice model,’ which contends that behavior
results from individuals acting to maximize the
expected benefit of their individual decisions.
Individuals make these decisions after weighing
expected benefits and costs and choosing the
action or behavior that offers the highest
expected net benefit or lowest expected net cost.
Behavior change is particularly relevant to
environmental challenges and is a topic that has
been studied extensively across disciplines.
Theoretical models of human behavior,
especially as it relates to consumption, are
important for conceptualizing behavior while
also signaling how behavior can be changed.
These models help us understand how social
and psychological influences affect behavior,
which can further aid in identifying effective
intervention strategies.
B) MODELS OF BEHAVIOR CHANGE
The behavioral science revolution has brought
forward a range of models and heuristics to
explain how behavior change occurs.
Interventions to influence human behavior and
choice often draw on these models to varying
degrees. More such models exist than can be
adequately detailed here, but below we highlight
several archetypes that appear in most
mainstream behavior change models.
After each model’s description, we also
summarize its core logic using the following
symbols:
1. CHANGE 2. INCREASE 3.
ACTIVATION
1. Education Model Says Knowledge =
Attitude = Behavior
2. Extrinsic motivation models Rewards or
Punishment= Behavior
3. Intrinsic motivation models Satisfaction
+ Autonomy= Behavior
4. Information-processing based models :
Supportive environments=Ability
+Attitudes/knowledge + Meaningful =
Behavior
5. Social models : Social norm =Personal
values= = Behavior
4.2.Applying behavior change tools to natural
resource conservation and climate action
Changing behavior to solve environmental
challenges is not in and of itself a new idea.
Indeed, if most environmental problems are
rooted in human behavior, then most any tool
we have deployed to solve them is
fundamentally a behavior change tool. The fact
is simply that the most common approaches thus
far applied to addressing climate change and
any number of other challenges have depended
on a fairly narrow set of tools that can be
summarized largely by the following:
• Providing information to improve knowledge-
based decision-making;
• Setting rules and regulations (or what is
commonly known as command-and-control) to
set limits on what
is allowed and what is not; and
• Introducing economic or market incentives
(e.g.,subsidies, payments, rewards) or
disincentives (e.g., taxes, fines).
While designing climate change behavior
change programs, it requires sets out what
doesn’t work, what does work as well as a
toolkit of strategies to foster long term behavior
change (based on social science research).
What doesn’t work
1.Pure information campaigns : Many behavior
change programs bombard participants with
information. These programs fail to realize that
research indicates that pure information
campaigns have minimal effect on changing
behavior
2.Monetary rewards
There is a belief that you can change behaviors
by showing people how their actions can save or
earn them money. Research suggests that this
idea is overrated and alone may not lead to
behavior change.
Telling people what to dowe must avoid telling
an audience what to do at all costs. It is far more
effective for people to request information and
voluntarily change their behavior.
3.Poorly targeted programs
It is important to target your program at the right
audience to obtain the desired behaviour change.
What works?
1.Your target audience :
Give up your assumptions Give up everything
you think you know about them [your audience,
Get to know them You will need to research
your audience to work effectively with
them.Find out about their responsibilities,
aspirations, values, behaviours, what they are
unhappy about, the obstacles they face, how they
perceive climate change,
Look beyond the converts It is important to
engage people who are not taking appropriate
action. Converts practicing a low impact lifestyle
may still be engaged by acting as role models
and sharing their personal experiences with
others.
2.Engage your audience : 7.Removing external barriers
Social forces, Social forces are very powerful in 8.Facilitating the Rapid Adoption of New Ideas
creating behaviour change. Social forces and Behaviors
(particularly face to face communications and
telephone calls) are therefore immensely
powerful and play a major role in 4.3 Behavior change tools & Techniques
influencing attitudes and behaviour.
Emerging evidence from new and innovative
Emotional Appeals, Emotions can be powerful
approaches to changing human behavior give
motivators as well as de-motivators for
reason for hope.
behaviour change
Create visual images, when discussing the
Behavior Change Toolkit
threats of climate change make sure they are
easy for the audience to visualise. People are
Once target group engaged, there are a number
more concerned about threats that can be easily
of effective tools which can be used to
imagined and often discount threats that are too
encourage behavior change to occur as follows;
general or distant (e.g. rising sea levels). Using
visuals wherever possible (e.g. props and
1. Nudges , i.e. Customers “nudged” by
images) can help to avoid this problem.
being given pre portioned meal sizes
Overcome mental barriers Barriers may be
2. Prompts , i.e. Participant received text-
broken down through peer pressure,
message reminders to red meat intake
empowering the audience,
3. Justification , i.e. Carbon footprint
offering social support and modelling the
information of meal choices displayed
desired behavior.
4. Instructions , i.e. Energy saving tips
3.Keep it personal, Evoke a future worth
provided to households
fighting for
5. Feedback , i.e. Monthly energy
4.Communication : The credibility and
statement mailed to households
respectability of the speaker is more important
6. Social modeling , i.e. Neighborhood
than the content presented.
leaders model a pro environmental
5.The message : One or two sided, Be clear and
behavior.
specific, Focus on the losses, Empower rather
7. Cognitive dissonance , i.e. Stressed the
than threaten
gap between an individual’s
6.Experiences rather than data
actions(driving) and values
8. Commitment , i.e. Subjects committed
to reduce car use
9. Reward and threat: Makes the adoption
of behaviors seem attractive or makes
the failure to adopt practices seem
threatening. This is linked to the concept
of “value exchange”
10. Shaping Knowledge: Helps people to
understand what adaptation behaviors
are, how to perform them, and where to
acquire the technologies and materials
needed.
11. Social Support : Involves providing
resources and facilitating influence.
“Seeding” a new behavior with a trusted
person or group helps ensure the new
behavior appears desirable and starts to
become the norm, leading people to
want to emulate and model it.
12. Goals, planning and monitoring:
Working with an audience’s goals
involves unearthing its aspirations,
ambitions, and intentions, reframing the
new behavior as a way of achieving the
goals, and helping the audience realize
its goals through the medium of the new
behavior.
13. Comparisons: Provides a choice of
options and the opportunity for people to
compare what is available with the
options chosen by their peers, neighbors,
friends, and family members.
14. Identity and self belief: Targets audiences
according to their actual or aspirational
roles. Gender and other roles determine
how we perceive ourselves, how we are
perceived, and how we are expected to
think and act. Linked to this is the
process of increasing people’s sense of
self-efficacy and building momentum
behind a desire to change their behavior.
15. Regulation: Regulatory mechanisms
include bans and restrictions, or industry
standards. They are a measure of
enforcement as opposed to persuasion,
and can amplify “softer” behavior change
techniques.
16. Competition Group competition reduced
energy use at university residence Goal
Group goal of 5%energy reduction given
to households.
4.4 What roles can government Officials play in
driving behavior change?
National governments have a wide palette of
policy options to choose from to support
behavior change toward lower-carbon lifestyles.
The traditional policy tool of making high-
emitting behaviors more expensive through
taxation is one option. Beyond driving behavior
change, such taxes can send an important
cultural signal about the social acceptability of incentivize behavior change and reduce
high-emitting behaviors, which may be emissions in line with the Paris commitments.
important in reaching the critical mass of 25
percent of a population exhibiting a behavior 5.Developing an BC Strategy and
before it becomes the social convention Implementation Plan for Climate Change
(Centola et al. 2018). Adaptation
Another role for national governments in
driving behavior change can be to incentivize In dealing with the challenge of climate change ,
regional and local governments to take it is must act on several fronts of behavior
appropriate action and to be centers of
innovation, as well as set up databases for change in a focused manner simultaneously. This
tracking emissions and policies to reduce them, Action Plan hinges on the development and use
or coordinate information sharing on best of new methods and technologies. The
practices. implementation of the Plan would be through
appropriate institutional mechanisms suited for
4.5 How should developers of long-term
strategies address behavior change? effective delivery of each individual Mission's
objectives and include public private
Overall, long-term climate strategies should partnerships and civil society action. The focus
explicitly consider the possibility of behavior
will be on promoting understanding of climate
change in high-impact sectors (particularly in
neglected areas such as aviation and diet, in change, adaptation and mitigation, energy
addition to the more frequently studied car efficiency and natural resource conservation.
transport and energy use) when developing
current and future policies. Modeling and
scenario development should explore different
possible degrees of behavior change, informed
by the remaining carbon budget, to meet climate
targets as well as normative social goals for how
to achieve this fairly. These would help identify
priority areas for more active monitoring and
testing of policy and innovation designed to
NOTES
NOTES
NOTES