Turning plastic awareness into climate action: Lessons for the planet

Using successful communication methods to promote sustainable behaviours
Girl cleaning litter from a sandy beach
Title: Turning plastic awareness into climate action: Lessons for the planet
Funded by: (funded by the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme)
Funding amount:
Location: Cornwall
Dates: June 2025 – January 2026
Project partners:
²ÝùÊÓƵ researchers: Hayley Hill (PI), Dr Jodie Fisher
 

Everyone knows about the environmental problems associated with plastic pollution, and rightly so… but what about climate change?

Objectives

Working with children, teachers, and families in nine Cornish primary schools, we will:
  • Discover how information about plastic pollution has been relayed and retained by children, at school and at home.
  • Use the techniques identified to help children design activities that will embed the message of how sustainable actions help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change.
  • Follow-up to find out if any sustainable actions have been adopted, at home and/or school, by children, teachers, or their families.
The children taking part will be citizen scientists, meaning they will have an active role in analysing the data we collect from them to find how plastic pollution has been communicated so successfully and then use this information to design and create activities for other children to promote knowledge of small actions anyone can take to help fight climate change.
Families of our citizen scientists and teachers will also be involved in the project, to determine the types of communication children have been exposed to at home and school so this can be incorporated into creating activities that will really help to increase knowledge of sustainable behaviours.
This project will enable us and our citizen scientists to create engaging and successful communication methods that can be used in schools everywhere to highlight the importance of acting sustainably to help slow down climate change and look after the world we live in.
Child litter picking
Recycling illustration
Children holding a green sphere

What is citizen science?

Citizen science is the public participating "in scientific research activities when citizens actively contribute to science either with their intellectual effort or surrounding knowledge or with their tools and resources" (European Commission, 2014).
Citizen science can engage research participants in a range of scientific activities, from data collection and analysis to co-design of research questions and public engagement, with the aim of educating and informing citizens on the subject matter you are researching as well as fostering confidence in research results by allowing for a greater understanding of how science and scientists work. Citizen science projects must also contribute to research or produce new research-based knowledge.
The funding for this project has been provided by the IMPETUS Accelerator Kickstarter grant (funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme), who support citizen science projects to bring science closer to society and policymakers, and acknowledge the role the general public have in tackling the greatest challenges of our time through their participation in citizen science projects.
Find out more about the project and citizen science on the .
IMPETUS is supporting our project. IMPETUS is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101058677. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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