Philipe Bujold, PhD - Behavioural Science for Environmental Impact

Behavioural Science
for Environmental Impact

Environmental challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, and plastic pollution are ultimately challenges of human behaviour. Addressing them requires a deeper understanding of how people think, feel, and interact with the world around them. That's where an applied behavioural scientist comes in.

Explore My Approach

About Me

Hi there! I've been researching, designing, and implementing behaviour change interventions for over a decade. I've worked on projects in 14+ countries with teams big and small to identify what works and build the systems needed to track real-world impact.

Philipe Bujold, PhD - Applied behavioural scientist specializing in conservation and climate change

I started my career studying primate decision-making, examining how our closest relatives evaluate rewards and navigate uncertainty. That research, culminating in a PhD from Cambridge, gave me a perspective I still carry: it's our evolutionary history as primates, and the constraints this puts on our brains, that lead to many of the predictable biases we show in our decision-making.

As a behavioural scientist, I've taken these insights and applied them to the most widespread primate of all: humans. At Rare's Center for Behavior & the Environment—the first "nudge unit" dedicated to environmental challenges—I helped shape applied behavioural science in the environmental space, working with organisations around the world to translate research findings into practical, on-the-ground interventions that help communities shift toward sustainable practices.

Now I'm bringing everything I've learned to new partners and problems.

Why Behavioural Science?

Most environmental programmes aim to change behaviour, but few are designed around how behaviour actually works. They focus on what's visible: awareness, attitudes, stated intentions. But behaviour is shaped just as much by what's harder to see: the social norms people absorb without noticing, the friction that makes good intentions stall, the way choices are framed and structured. These forces operate whether we account for them or not. The question is whether we're designing interventions with them or against them.

Behavioural science replaces intuition with evidence, mapping the psychological, social, and structural factors that shape your audience's choices. You can identify where interventions will have traction and where they'll fall flat, target what actually matters rather than what's easiest to address, and distinguish programmes that generate activity from programmes that generate impact.

My Approach

Whether you need support on a specific project or want to build your organisation's behaviour change strategy and capability, I work alongside your team to deliver results. For project work, I follow a structured process: discover, design, demonstrate. Each phase can stand alone or combine into a full engagement depending on your needs. I also offer ongoing advisory support for organisations who want a behavioural science partner on retainer.

Discover

I help you understand what's really driving behaviour. Through literature reviews, behavioural systems mapping, and mixed-methods research with your stakeholders and target population, I map the actors involved and what shapes their choices: the psychological, social, and structural determinants of behaviour. This research gives you a theory of change that guides intervention design.

Design

I work with your team to design interventions that target the behavioural determinants identified in the Discover phase. The approach depends on what will work best for your context and capacity. It might involve changing how options are presented, tapping into social norms, shifting how something is framed, or rethinking incentives altogether. I help you pilot and refine before you deploy.

Demonstrate

I bring rigorous impact evaluation into your programmes from the very start, using RCTs or appropriate quasi-experimental methods to measure shifts in behaviour and its determinants. Beyond measurement, I build your team's capacity to monitor, learn, and adapt in real time, giving you the tools to know how your intervention is performing during its deployment and to course-correct if needed.

I'm also available for talks at conferences, workshops, and panels — bringing the same evidence-based approach to audiences across conservation, climate, and sustainability.

Sample Projects

Agriculture

Promoting Climate-Smart Agriculture

Past efforts to shift Colombian farmers toward sustainable practices had struggled to achieve lasting uptake. For Rare's Lands for Life programme, the research uncovered why: farmers were highly averse to ambiguity, and the norms guiding their decisions weren't aligned with the practices being promoted. These findings shaped a three-phase approach: first, making adoption easy for early adopters; then, making their success visible through social proof; and finally, turning proof into social expectation.

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Climate adaptation behaviour change research in Fiji

Climate Resilience

Understanding Why Climate Adaptation Stalls

The Fijian government had promoted vetiver grass planting to help communities reduce riverbank erosion, but uptake had stalled. Working with IISD, the research identified six determinants shaping adoption. Past efforts had likely shifted the dial on some of these, but issues remained: training was too brief, women were excluded despite being key custodians of the riverbanks, and local knowledge was ignored.

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Conservation behaviour change for communal resource management

Natural Resources

Sustainable Management of Shared Resources

Many environmental challenges are common pool resource dilemmas, and a single intervention is rarely enough. Multiple determinants need to shift at both individual and community levels, and timing matters. For Rare's Fish Forever programme across Asia-Pacific, the work involved shaping interventions and piloting monitoring systems that track shifts in psychological, social, and structural determinants in real time.

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Behavioural Science
for Environmental Impact

About Me