Promoting individual actions on climate change

Following the nearly two week-long UN Climate Change Conference COP24 held at Katowice, Poland on December 02-15, prospects of any significant progress in coming up with the 2015 Paris Agreement "rulebook" do not seem very bright although some deliberations took place on the issue.
Though the loggerheads between different developed nations and developing ones had frustrated many environmentalists during the conference, a number of positive developments had also shone light at the end of the tunnel.
One such initiative is the ActNow.Bot, a social media chatbot launched on December 03 by Sir David Attenborough during the conference. A chatbot is a computer programme designed to simulate conversation with human users over the internet. ActNow.Bot uses the Facebook messenger platform to speak with users based anywhere across the world, about the ways through which they can take personal action that will contribute in the global fight against climate change.
If any user opens the chatbot, it takes him or her to a chatbox where the user is given the following message, "you have the power to tackle climate change. Small changes can make a big difference if we all work together. The United Nations has identified 10 key actions that you can take in your daily life and record here. Our collective actions from around the globe will be presented to world leaders at the UN Climate Summit in September 2019."
The 10 key actions that the user can select from include 'Meat free meals', 'Lights off', 'Drive Less', 'Energy-saving lightbulbs', 'Refill and reuse', '5-minute showers', 'Local produce', 'Build your own bag', 'Unplug' and 'Recycle'.
Under each action, there are two options: 'Act Now' and 'Tell me more'.
The second option provides users with a two-to-three-line brief about the action. For example, the brief for 'Meat free meals' says: "Meat production and distribution has a detrimental impact on greenhouse gas emissions. We need to start shifting towards more plant-based diets."
When a user clicks on 'Act Now', it registers the personal commitment by the user to carry out the said action.
While launching the bot, Attenborough had said that the chatbot will help "people to discover simple everyday actions that they can take, because they recognise that they too must play their part" against climate change.
Till date, the bot has registered 60,000 actions by users from across the world. Once the action is completed by the user in real life, he or she can register it as 'complete' by clicking on a similar option in the bot.
This initiative will undoubtedly leave a mark on the minds of people who have, for long, been in the backseat of the proverbial car that was driven by their policy-makers who represented them at the Climate Change Conferences. Now this chatbot will open up the scope for many people to understand climate change, learn about the different ways through which their actions are affecting this crisis and how they can take some steps to battle it.
Facebook messenger as the platform for this chatbot is a phenomenal selection as it had around 1.3 billion active users as of September 2017. The number is expected to reach 2.48 billion by end of 2021.
At this time, the campaign is available to users in English, Spanish and French. In order to make the bot more successful by reaching more users, the developers can include other languages like Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Sinhalese, Swahili and more; especially the languages of those countries that are most affected by climate change.
Similar initiatives where the power of social media and the internet can be harnessed to increase global public awareness about pressing issues and how to tackle them should be forthcoming. After all, a significant portion of social media users is the youth, who will be inheriting this earth along with its problems in the near future.

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