Future-Proofing Humanity: What Behavioral Science Can Teach Us About Climate Action
In the latest episode of We Are Not Doomed, we sit down with Brett Jenks, CEO of Rare, a global conservation organization that’s pioneering new approaches to climate action. Brett shares his fascinating journey from the world of film production to leading Rare’s mission of inspiring behavioral change to help both people and nature thrive. He emphasizes the importance of understanding human behavior in solving climate challenges, explaining how Rare uses behavioral science to empower local communities worldwide. From sustainable farming in Colombia to restoring fisheries in Mozambique, Brett reveals how Rare is creating scalable, community-led solutions that blend environmental conservation with human development.
One of the most exciting initiatives discussed is Rare’s innovative foray into the video game world. Brett explains how their game EverForest allows players to plant real trees in the world simply by engaging with the game—a creative and accessible way to get millions involved in climate action. Throughout the episode, Brett highlights the need for cooperation and systemic change to future-proof humanity against climate change’s growing impacts, from mass migration to environmental degradation. Despite the challenges, Brett remains optimistic, sharing his belief that we are more adaptable as a species than we give ourselves credit for.
We Discussed:
Brett Jenks' career journey: From film production to leading global conservation at Rare.
Rare’s mission: Inspiring behavioral change to help people and nature thrive together.
The power of behavioral science: How understanding human behavior is key to solving climate issues.
Community-led conservation: Empowering local leaders to manage natural resources sustainably.
Innovative funding approaches: Using private capital to scale environmental solutions.
Video game initiative for climate action: How Rare's game EverForest plants real trees based on player actions.
Scaling conservation efforts: Rare’s partnerships with governments, corporations, and NGOs to expand impact.
The global challenge of climate migration: How climate change is forcing millions to move.
Adapting to climate change: The role of cooperation in future-proofing humanity.
Hope for the future: Brett’s belief in humanity's ability to adapt and create meaningful change.
Links:
Episode Transcript:
Brett Jenks (00:00):
If we look at it, these technologies, you have climate change, you have bioengineering, you have ai, and you have a new rise of totalitarianism and xenophobia. How are we going to address that? By learning how to build a culture that will steward nature and a culture that is open to cooperation. So I think cooperatively managing and stewarding the natural resources on which life depends is probably the best way for us to future proof humanity.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (00:39):
Hello everyone, and welcome to We Are Not Doomed. We bring you interviews with industry leaders, authors, journalists, and real people who are making an impact on climate change Every single day We Are Not Doomed is produced by Puddle Creative. We're a full service podcast production agency. And I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld, the executive producer today. Our guest is Brett Jenks. He's the CEO of Rare, a nonprofit that has led environmental conservation projects for 50 years, helping people and nature thrive together through community-led efforts across 60 countries. Brett was a journalist and film producer before he traveled to Costa Rica in 1992. Started working with Rare on an ecotourism program and became CEO in the year 2000. Brett has scaled Rare's Fish Forever program that revitalize his coastal fisheries. He's launched partnerships with government agencies and companies like Bloomberg Philanthropies, Netflix and Nat Geo. We talk about Brett's career story, the mission of Rare, why it's important for farming and fishing communities to have sustainable financing and the incentive to keep their environments clean and sustainable.
(01:52):
We also talk about actions that individual people, specifically North Americans can take to change our behavior and fight climate change. And he talks a lot about behavioral science research, which I find really fascinating and how you can apply that to change making and climate change. We discuss the future programs of Rare as well as why he cares about climate change and how his life has been affected by it. I hope you enjoy this interview with Brett. If you do, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts. Now here's our interview. Well, Brett, thanks for being on the podcast.
Brett Jenks (02:34):
Thanks for having me.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (02:35):
So I want to talk all about Rare today, your organization and what you guys do and the things you're working on right now. But first, this podcast is for people who are interested in the climate change field, may be interested in working in the field, but also just wanting to know more about the people who are doing great things. So how did you end up here? What's your career story?
Brett Jenks (02:59):
I was a film producer in Boston, Massachusetts, and I was working 16 hour, 17 hour days, seven days a week at times, making American Express and Dunking Donuts TV commercials. And I literally woke up one morning with a hangover,
(03:18):
Looked up on the wall of my flat in Boston, my little teeny tiny, you only call it a flat because it was so small, it had a room for a bicycle and a bed. And I looked up at the wall and I had written in Sharpie on the wall, get out of the film business, and I had signed it and it was a big rat party after a two week job. And let's just say I had a little too much to drink. I didn't remember writing it, and I like to say the writing was literally on the wall. I had remembered seeing and shooting a documentary on Harvard's campus, those little dogeared pull stickers for apartments or beds or cars, those little college advertisements. I had seen something for a group called World Teach and it said, come teach English in Namibia. And I thought, okay, I would rather go teach in Namibia than make another Dunking Donuts TV commercial.
(04:27):
And so I quit the film business and I signed up for Namibia. I got all the shots a week before I left. They canceled the program and they said, do you want to go to Costa Rica? And I said, literally, where's Costa Rica? And I looked on a map and I saw it was right between Panama, which we had just invaded and Nicaragua, which was always at war. And I thought, well, what could go wrong? Let's go to Costa Rica, having no idea that it was this idyllic little army free tropical haven in the middle of Central America. And I've basically worked on issues related to conservation, the global south human development ever since I stepped foot in Costa Rica. So it was really sort of a midlife crisis at 24, 25 and changed my life.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (05:19):
And so now today you are the CEO of Rare. Tell us just the elevator pitch of who is rare, what do you guys do? What's your mission?
Brett Jenks (05:28):
So our mission is to inspire change so people and nature thrive. That looks like helping fishermen in the Philippines and Indonesian Mozambique restore their coastal fisheries back to their natural status, meaning full of fish so that people are capable of feeding themselves, capable of making a buck, saving some money, getting insurance, and that requires restoration of coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass beds. So it's a conservation and human development project and we're inspiring local leadership and equipping them with insights from behavioral science and proven community engagement practices that let them succeed. Or helping farmers in Columbia recognize that all of their neighbors have started to compost and plant row crops and ring fence their cattle and adopt other highly sustainable regenerative agriculture practices. Ultimately, it's about behavior change and social norms, and that's very different from most conservation organizations. But our insight has been that look, if you want to save the species, if you want to save chimpanzees and rhinos and lions, and if you want to save the habitats that they require, there's really only one species that you need to understand. And that's us, the people because we are the source of the threat and therefore we are the solution, but we have to get better at adapting, at changing. And so that's what we're trying to do.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (07:13):
Yeah, that brings up for me, it seems like a common thread in this, even when you're talking about your career story is that storytelling is a lot of what this is, right?
Brett Jenks (07:25):
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I have a friend who says, nobody ever marched on Washington over a flip chart or a bar chart, but people march for stories and people's identities in part are linked to stories. We have a story of self. And we have a story of our tribe and we have a story of our nation or of our team or of our purpose. And stories drive us probably more than any other tool we have, which is why people talk a lot about changing the narrative. In a way what that means is not just changing the words, but it's changing the stories we tell ourselves, which are about who we are and about what we want and what we aspire to achieve and therefore why we're doing what we're currently doing.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (08:21):
So I just want to kind of zoom out, if you will, to talk about Rare as an organization. You mentioned before we started the interview that you have five different nonprofit programs, but you also have three for-Profit subsidiaries. So talk to me a little bit about that, but also just how many programs do you guys have around the world, the history of how Rare started and kind of where you got to where you are today?
Brett Jenks (08:48):
So Rare was founded about 50 years ago by a bird watcher and a lawyer, well, three bird watchers. One was a lawyer, one was a pilot and one was a scientist.
(09:00):
What they had in common was an interest in saving endangered or threatened really special birds in the developing tropics in the global south. And they decided that they needed to foster environmental education. So at its core, rare has long been about inspiring change one way or the other, building love of nature and fomenting social movements to protect, to protect nature, not just for nature's sake, but for the betterment of people themselves. I've been involved with rare 30 years, and if you jump ahead today, we have a core program which is called the Center for Behavior in the Environment, which basically takes all of the great insights and lessons learned from what has basically been a behavioral revolution over the last 30 years from psychologists are now winning the Nobel Prize in economics because they really have something to offer in terms of insights on human nature, why we behave the way we do, how predictably irrational we are.
(10:11):
As Dan Arieli says, how we were assumed to be homo economicus in a way, humans who walk the earth with a calculator constantly maximizing the utilitarian value of everything we do, when in reality we're far less rational than we give ourselves credit for. We buy things we don't need all the time. We buy things that we think will impress other people. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're wrong. We spend money in some ridiculous ways, so we're not that rational. Once you begin to look at the hundreds of insights from evolutionary biology, social psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, first it gets overwhelming and then you begin to see patterns and you can begin to apply those insights to major systemic social and environmental problems like climate change. So what does that look like? Well, if we know that you can address climate change by having people change the way they heat their homes and cool their homes, change the cars, they drive and change their diets. If you take your home, your transportation and food for any individual and there's 330 million Americans, that's probably 60% of their greenhouse gas emissions now, of course. So you can blame 99 fossil fuel companies, which you should do or you can blame them and vote for policies that will address the cause and you can take personal action. And the best way to get people to adopt personal action is to create a sense that everyone's doing it.
(11:55):
So now that we're at five or 6% adoption of EVs of solar panels, we're at probably 10% and growing of plant rich diets, the more we talk about it, the more we accept it, the more we normalize it, the more likely it is for people to be able to sell solar arrays, to be able to sell EVs, to be able to pass policies that will encourage their increased adoption. So behavioral science really helps us, whether we're talking about policy or implementation of policy or personal behaviors, the way we manage fisheries and mangroves or soil in our farms. So that's the core idea. So a Center for Behavior helps us think about that, helps us actually put those thoughts into action that then lets us apply those insights in several really interesting ways. So we've talked a little bit about coastal fisheries, we've talked a little bit about farming in high biodiversity areas like Columbia, and then we can also talk about Hollywood and our own behavior. So those are three really meaningful, really promising applications of behavioral science for good. Finally, if you're going to scale those programs and if you're going to attract the talent that you need or the skill sets that you need to make these strategies ubiquitous, you have to think about different kinds of capital. So the average nonprofit in the United States has a budget less than a million dollars. There's only a couple hundred nonprofits that have really significant budgets
(13:38):
And they've been built over decades to raise philanthropic donations. What's interesting is if you look at Silicon Valley and you look at the way a company can come up with a solution like a better search algorithm in Google's case and then go out and raise massive amounts of capital in one or two years to be able to scale a technology, then all of a sudden you have a half a trillion or trillion dollar company. No nonprofit could ever do that because that capital and those returns are never there. So about seven years ago, we started asking ourselves, well, if we're a creative organization and we're trying to get to change at scale, how can we not only raise philanthropic dollars, but how could we bring private capital to accelerating these solutions? And so we went out and when we decided to create the first ever impact investment fund for coastal fisheries, so rare was already working in coastal fisheries.
(14:46):
We already had at that point 50 or 60 communities that were adopting new ways of managing their coastal waters, new gear, new protected area systems, new enforcement regimes, new ways of cooperating. And so the question was can we also bring the private sector with us? Could we bring in private capital so that the buyers of those community fisheries could reform their practices and could they then get additional revenue? Could they boost their margins by exporting a high value product from coastal fisheries to Europe or to the United States? So we raised $22 million, we've invested all that money and so far we're on track in the next three years as we sort of harvest the fund to get an appropriate risk adjusted return. But that let us bring 22 extra, well, actually probably plus 3 million of technical assistance philanthropy
(15:48):
That 25 million has probably leveraged, and I'm just guessing here, but I'd say probably 75 million or more in private capital that has come into those local businesses, into those communities, which we could never have done with philanthropy. So that's why we proved out and sort of de-risked that idea. So now the question is what else could we do that would bring private capital into the sustainability, the sustainability efforts? We had another idea to begin to engage people more meaningfully in this question of climate change. So as we thought about EVs and we thought about solar panels and heat pumps, and we thought about plant rich diets, we also identified that there's enough people out there willing to donate 20 or $30 to the environment every month that we began to wonder whether there was a way to scale up people making small contributions to proven approaches to protecting nature. And so as we looked, especially nature-based climate solutions, and so as we looked at those, the one we identified that was the least controversial, sort of the one thing in nature that everyone agrees on, more or less, I'm generalizing here, is tree planting.
(17:07):
Nobody argues against planting a tree as long as it's the right tree and as long as you take care of it after you plant it, who doesn't love a tree? So what would it look like to engage millions of people to plant billions of trees? And so to do that, since we are already working with streaming services in Hollywood, we said, so what's the other kind of platform or medium where you can engage and customize and experience on mass with billions of people? And so believe it or not, we chose the video game industry and we started a company, I started it with two co-founders. It's called Carbon Counts Tech. Our first game is going to be released globally during climate week in September, and the first game is called Ever Forest. And the idea is you play a really compelling, really fun video game where in the video game you're challenged with restoring a habitat and while you restore it, if you're willing to watch a couple of ads or spend a little bit of money, we plant real trees in the real world. And so right now we've already planted 2 million trees in mangroves in Kenya, in Deforested lands in Rwanda, and our goal is to plant a hundred million trees and engage tens if not hundreds of millions of people in the game so that we can create what could be the lowest cost way to engage people in climate change while also planting trees all over the world. So we're willing to take risks, we're willing to be creative, but ultimately it's all about engaging people, helping them feel empowered to make a difference, which is something we sorely need.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (18:54):
Yeah, wow, that's really cool. The video game sounds fun. So maybe talk to me a little bit about the future of Rare when you kind of look into your crystal ball, maybe three to five years down the road, what's the future look like for you guys?
Brett Jenks (19:13):
My hope is that we can maintain a current course and trajectory, especially around our commitment to being creative, to being respectful of and compassionate for, and work in partnership with some of the world's poorest people who happen to live in the world's richest places. We want to maintain the values we've operated under for the last 25 years, commitment to accountability and a mindset of solution and positivity and creativity with a serious investment that we're willing to make in people, people who work for us and people who partner with us and people who can benefit from our work. But then long-term, I think our challenge and really our opportunity is going to be to take these promising emerging approaches and scale them through partnerships with some of the largest and smallest organizations around the world. We're now partnering with the governments of Indonesia and the Philippines and Mozambique and Brazil.
(20:20):
We're partnering with some of the largest and best known environmental organizations in the world. Some of the big NGOs. We're partnering with a group of corporations that have and technologies that engage five, 6 billion people weekly. And so if we can leverage organizations large and small to foment distribution of proven models that are locally focused and locally directed and customized to adapt to local cultures, we don't have to be a huge organization to have a global impact. And so in the beginning for me as CEO 25 years ago, it was about getting rare moving and getting rare, growing and trying to build our reputation. I think the next 25 years for rare should be about continuing to innovate with a focus on impact and scale and partnership. And I think this is crucial because it doesn't take a crystal ball to look at what's coming our way. The storms are getting bigger, the prosperity gap is getting wider. Climate migration is something that I probably lose the most sleep over. I think about denuded landscapes, dried up farms, coastal communities that have been perpetually flooded, and the un predicting that somewhere between 200 million and a billion people are going to need to move towards the polls in order to survive, in order to be able to live, and where are they going to go? And the geopolitical disruption that that's going to create in the xenophobia
(22:14):
That's going to unleash means we had better, if we look at it, these technologies, you have climate change, you have bioengineering, you have ai, and you have the rise, a new rise of totalitarianism and xenophobia. How are we going to address that by learning how to build a culture that will steward nature? It's a big challenge and a culture that is open to cooperation. So I think cooperatively managing and stewarding the natural resources on which life depends is probably the best way for us to future proof humanity. And I say that with full humility, knowing we're just one organization, but that's what we have to achieve the next 50 years.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (23:05):
Yeah, makes me think of one of the first interviews I did for this podcast was with Bill Weir, who's the CNN climate correspondent, and he talked about pluralistic ignorance where a lot of Americans feel that most other Americans don't care about climate change when in fact that's definitely not true. Probably around 80% of Americans care about climate change. So it's something that, it's part of the stories we tell ourselves that we think that a lot of people don't care, but it's definitely going to take us all moving in that direction to be able to survive it. And as you said, all the other downstream effects of mass migration happening as well.
Brett Jenks (23:53):
Yeah, I think Bill's onto something. In fact, he might have even been referring to some of our research at the Center for Behavior in the Environment because pluralistic ignorance rears its head over all the solution sets for climate change. We decided that was too nerdy a term. So what we've tried to call it is just this, and I don't think we did much better to be quite honest. But it's a normative bubble where basically if you think about EVs or solar panels or contributing to nature or buying carbon offsets or just any action that actually matters in addition to voting, obviously most people think there's probably a 20 to 30% gap across the board between what people expect of other people and what they think is expected of them. So everyone thinks they're a little more noble than all of their friends and relatives and neighbors. So we tend to estimate when we poll people, we hear you're right in terms of recognition of climate change, most people are there in terms of what to do about it. People are really interested in EVs, in solar, in heat pumps in these solutions. There's a group of people who get a little frustrated when you couch it in climate change wrappings,
(25:14):
But for the most part, people want to do these things, but they don't know that other people expect them to. And one of the questions is, how do you break that gap? I'd love to see CNN putting up a weekly poll that shows that normative bubble busting. I'd love Washington Post and the New York Times to help us track that so that we could just say, look, guess what? It's coming your way. Everyone's starting to expect you to do this. That's how this change is going to happen eventually.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (25:44):
I like to end on a couple questions that are a little bit more personal, and as you said, this is something that is coming your way, right? It's affecting us in the here and now. So how has climate change affected your life already?
Brett Jenks (25:59):
Personally, I obviously try to walk the talk. So my personal behaviors are consistent except for flying, which clearly we offset really significantly in myriad ways. But my lifestyle is pretty consistent with the things that we're asking other people to do. So whether it's the sharing a car and having it be electric and charging it with solar panels or eating a plant rich diet, but on a more, I guess professional slash personal note, we've had entire projects, entire communities wiped out by climate change already.
(26:41):
We work, I can remember one last summer having a typhoon blow through two communities that we love and partner with in Mozambique the entire north coast of Honduras, and same month had a hurricane that just hovered around and flooded some of our staff's housing communities in which we operate. Some of them were decimated in the Philippines. They're up to an average of 12 to 15 typhoons a year in Indonesia. So our friends, our family, our staff are constantly challenged not only by the growing atrocity that is climate change, but it also affects the way you think about the future. It also is destabilizing these communities. So Hondurans, Hondurans or Colombian farmers, you stand in a field with them, find 20 farmers in Honduras or Columbia who have less than 10 acres and are eeking out a living. And I will guarantee you a quarter of them, if not half of them are having discussions regularly about when they're going to move because it is just getting too hard. And it's not like they can just move their 10 acres up the hillside the way a mosquito might or a bird might seeking new habitat. They don't own that land. They can't necessarily migrate altitudinal the way some species are going to be able to, so what are they going to do? So this is deeply personal for billions of people already.
(28:28):
I guess I just have personally, I guess both the privilege and the heartache of having to know a lot of those people. So it affects you. I'm privileged white male American, so I know that I am least likely to really suffer in the near term, but this has the potential to unravel most of the things we take for granted.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (28:52):
Yeah, that's very powerful and just it's really great the work that Rare is doing to not only work with these communities, but also to highlight their stories and bring their stories to the 330 million Americans who it hasn't reached quite yet in that same way. But to wrap the podcast up on a more optimistic note, this podcast is called We Are Not Doomed. I wanted it to be not a naive title in that everything's going to be fine, but more of something that you've get up in the morning and say to yourself in the mirror in order to face the day. So when you get up in the morning, what keeps you going and makes you feel hopeful for the future?
Brett Jenks (29:40):
There's so many spots, there's so many things to celebrate, and there's so many committed people out there. There's a trillion dollars going into climate tech investing. We have an inflation reduction act that has set a standard that nobody one knows about even in America, but it has set a standard for other democratic nations around the world.
(29:58):
And just in our own work in day to day, we have a couple hundred creative, really creative, hardworking staff and thousands of partners and literally millions of people benefiting from and accelerating this work so we can restore fisheries. We've demonstrated it. We're now in 2000 communities around the world. Those 2000 communities, when Rare walks away, will continue this work without us. That's the idea. And those 2000 communities already are moving towards being more adaptive and more resilient to climate change. So that gives me hope. That means they're more likely to resist the temptation to just pull up stakes and leave, which will benefit their economies, their communities, and their culture. When I look at Hollywood and you see we have a convening with 25 of the leading reality TV show producers. We teamed up with a guy named Kyle ciso, who's a producer in Hollywood, and they all recognize the power and the value and the simplicity of just placing some of these sustainable lifestyle behaviors into their shows. So you're going to start seeing the Great Grill off the great Southern barbecue, and they'll probably be once in a while, a cauliflower steak instead of ribs or beef.
(31:23):
And that to me, that trend is going to grow. So ultimately what gives me hope is we're way better at change than we give ourselves credit for. We're highly adaptable as a species. That's why there's 8 billion of us and we're having too big an impact on the planet because we're really successful at adaptation and change. The question is, can we relieve the suffering in the process? Can we make it easier? And that comes down to just embracing that we need to change, we can change, and there's some things we can do to accelerate it.
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (31:59):
Yeah, that's wonderful. That's something I think to take away that another kind of mantra to just remember is that we are better at change than we give ourselves credit for. Especially, it's easy to forget that sometimes when you're thinking about the political landscape in the US and things like that, where you're like, sometimes you feel like things are moving too slowly, but yeah, that's a great thing to remember. Well, Brett, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Brett Jenks, the CEO of Rare. Yeah, we'll have to have you back to see how it's going in another couple years.
Brett Jenks (32:36):
Appreciate it. Thanks
Jonah Geil-Neufeld (32:39):
To Brett for coming on the podcast. If you want to learn more about Rare, you can go to rare.org. That's RAR e.org. If you want to find more episodes of this show or read transcripts, look at show notes and links, go to We Are Not doomed.com. You can find us and hit the follow button on Spotify Apple Podcasts or hit the subscribe button on our YouTube page. I'm Jonah Geil-Neufeld with Puddle Creative. Until next time, have a great week.