YEAR IN REVIEW

The BE.Center: Building Demand for Behavior-Centered Design

As conservation’s first center dedicated to behavioral design, the Center for Behavior & the Environment (BE.Center) is transforming how the environmental sector tackles our global challenges. The team has made major strides in building the field. Some highlights include:

• Launching behavior.rare.org, a first-of-its-kind online platform, which has already attracted more than 750 members in 79 countries.
• Releasing the Theory of Cooperative Behavior Adoption to accompany the BE.Center Behavioral Science Lead Dr. Erik Thulin’s TEDx Salon Cambridge talk. This guide walks practitioners through how to use behavioral insights to solve cooperative dilemmas, many of which are commonly found in natural resource management.
• Kevin Green, head of the BE.Center, joined environmentalist Bill McKibben, Karenna Gore, and other luminaries for a panel discussion on climate change at Chicago’s Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership.
• Launching our sixth Solution Search competition to surface, spotlight and accelerate proven behavioral solutions to reduce water pollution. This contest, Water Pollution & Behavior Change, is in partnership with 11th Hour Racing, The Circulate Initiative, the Inter-American Development Bank, Lonely Whale, The Nature Conservancy, and Ocean Conservancy.
• Celebrating the adoption of a landmark motion before the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)—the largest convened body of conservation organizations—calling on members to design behavior-centered solutions. Rare was the lead sponsor on this motion as it also gathered 27 other organizations to co-sponsor.

Fish Forever: Building Networks of Progress

While COVID-19 caused disruptions and delay, it also sparked innovation and collaboration among our country teams, governments, partner communities, and fishers.

• Delivering Data for Decision Making: In April, Rare launched the Fish Forever Portal, a digital hub designed to get real-time data into the hands of partners and decision makers quickly, reliably and conveniently, and help them manage local fisheries more effectively.
• Supporting Savings Clubs: To date, Rare has helped partner communities start over 300 savings clubs and mobilize $2.5 million for saving, lending and weathering emergencies. Incredibly, Rare helped partner communities set up 21 savings clubs since the global pandemic disrupted daily life in March. The pandemic put the mandate of these clubs to the test, and they rose to the occasion as the safety nets that they were designed to be: helping to distribute food when income and supply chains fell apart, providing masks, and coordinating community-wide support.
• Building Networks of Leaders: In September, for the first time ever, Rare convened government representatives from six Fish Forever countries for a virtual roundtable on the vital role small-scale fishers play in local food security, local economies, and marine conservation. In November, Rare brought together mayors from around the world to share experiences and nurture a growing global community of local leaders supporting small-scale fisheries.

Make It Personal: Personalizing the Climate Fight

In 2020, we continued to make the case for inspiring personal climate action as an important piece of the climate puzzle. If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that individuals are capable of changing their behavior. And we are also hearing more each day about the tremendous potential individual action has for sparking sustainable behaviors and driving down carbon emissions.

For the Make It Personal program, it was a year of strategy-building, innovating and developing pilot approaches to help Americans adopt climate-friendly behaviors.

• We designed a banking tool to help customers calculate the carbon footprint of their purchases and make climate-friendly spending decisions.
• We conducted in-depth qualitative consumer research on issues like transitioning to a plant-rich diet to better understand barriers and opportunities.
• We laid the groundwork for launching pilot initiatives in 2021, including partnering with one company to offer a “Green Benefits” package to test how employers might incentivize climate-friendly behaviors with employees. 

Lands for Life: Seeding Sustainable Agriculture in Colombia

In 2020, the newly-launched Lands for Life program took our work in Colombia in an exciting new direction. What started as small, incremental work in northern Colombia helping farmers become informed and empowered decision-makers quickly caught the eye of potential partners, including the government, regional NGOs and the private sector. This work opened up opportunities to scale our behavior-centered approach to sustainable agriculture.

The Meloy Fund: A Portfolio of Support

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted supply chains globally and roiled seafood markets, reducing the demand for sustainably-caught seafood from small-scale fishers and threatening livelihoods of coastal communities. In response, the Meloy Fund—a pioneering impact investment fund supported by Rare and providing capital to enterprises that benefit coastal communities and ecosystems—implemented a multi-pronged strategy to provide aid to small scale fishers and the businesses that support them.

As part of these efforts, the Meloy Fund introduced rapid response loans to ensure the long-term viability of small businesses and their fisher-suppliers, while assisting current portfolio companies to continue operations safely and employ their workers through the pandemic. As part of these efforts, the Meloy Fund closed three new investments so far in 2020, including two companies sourcing seaweed from small-scale mariculture farmers in the Philippines.

The Meloy Fund is now managed by Deliberate Capital.