How Facebook can help raise awareness on climate change
You’ve probably heard that 75 percent of Americans say that climate change will affect future generations, but less than 50 percent believe it will affect them personally. This is what led to the creation of The Mixed Reality Hackaton, an event gathering Yale teams to explore how virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies can more effectively communicate the threat of climate change.
Why VR ? The reason is quite simple : VR technology creates new opportunities to raise awareness of climate change impacts by tackling two of the biggest challenges of climate change communication : scale and proximity. As the Data-Driven Lab puts it :
Because emissions of greenhouse gases today will affect the climate long into the future, the temporal scale of climate change can be difficult for the public to comprehend. VR transports individuals into a future reality where long-term environmental changes can be experienced first-hand. Immersing people in the stark reality of a warmer world yet to come may encourage them to demand policy change today.
Another problem is that those who may have the least power to crate change are often the first to feel the harmful effects of global warming. VR can create an empathetic experience, making the effects of climate change highly personal, even for people who don’t experience its effects today. In other words, VR experiences offer a chance to expand people’s view of the world and unify them around a common global story of environmental change. And who has a mission of bringing the world closer together ? Yes, you got it. Facebook is in the best place to do the job.
Facebook’s mission
Two years ago, Facebook’s mission changed from “Making the world more open and connected” to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”. The idea behind this shift from connection to closeness was to create more meaningful interactions and, if possible, resulting in positive outcomes.
This has resulted in the development of products specifically aimed at bringing people closer. And among them, there are Oculus products, the VR branch of Facebook.
In this regard, using VR to raise awareness on climate change is perfectly in keeping with Facebook’s mission :
- It helps people caring more about the future of the place where they live.
- It helps people in rich countries caring more about underprivileged people affected by climate change.
- It helps people caring about future generations.
What better way to bring people together on a global scale?
What a pro-environment VR experience would look like ?
Let’s say you’re at home and you scroll your Facebook feed. Suddenly, you’re asked to participate in a free experience where you can see your neighbourhood in 30 years, based on your current location.
You see that your city has been impacted by sea level rise. In this experience, you can explore the flooded city and taking actions such as replacing cars with bicycles, or building solar farms in the place of power plants, like in the Data-Driven Yale team game. What if you live in a mountain ? Well, almost no place will be spared by climate change: its manifestations will simply take different forms. These could be simulated by powerful machine learning algorithms using available scientific data.
Back to the experience : after 20 seconds of use, you’re proposed to travel a little bit. Facebook shows you well-known places that are in very bad shape. You can visualize the impact of climate change. And you care, especially because some of the cities you see are suggested by your travel history collected by Facebook.
Then, 15 seconds later, you’re suggested to have a more realistic experience by discovering Oculus VR products.
Note that in this use case, people don’t really experience VR. The really added value is a program that simulates what they current location (and other places) could look like in the future.
But other use cases are possible. And they can take advantage of VR.
When you arrive on Oculus, the website where Facebook wants you to watch VR objects, you’re proposed to discover “Oculus Experiences” after scrolling down a little.
If you’re there, it’s very likely that you already own VR tools, or that you’re going to buy some of them. In other words, asking you to discover the future of your neighbourhood in this part of the website could be more relevant, in terms of intensity. Moreover, putting the experience in the home page would likely give it more visibility than in an obscure part of the website.
After being showed on the home page for a few weeks, the experiment could be placed next to the other free experiments offered in the Experiences page. And my guess is that it could be one of the most interesting free experiences available, after YouTube and Netflix.
At this stage, I wonder if such pro-environmental VR experience isn’t already in their roadmap. It you look closer at Oculus, there is now the VR for good Initiative.
The page invites you to discover stories on history, healthcare, personal development, or education. Thus, it’s likely that the next story will talk about people impacted by climate change.
And this could probably be a great news. Let’s look at the potential impact it could have.
Potential impact
The way we usually talk about climate change rarely stir emotions. However, the consequence of this phenomenon cloud really be massive : one hundred million people are projected to lose their lives in the next 10 years due to climate change. Roughly 75% of all humans could die due to deadly heat waves by 2100.
Recently, a study highlighted the benefits of RV in changing this lack of sensitivity to climate change. How ? Andrea Morris has described the experience in her article :
The Stanford Ocean Acidification Experience (SOAE) depicts the effects of climate change on our marine ecosystems. The simulation is available to the public to download for free. You can choose between being an avatar of a diver or being a piece of pink coral living your best life on an underwater reef. That is, until you and all your colorful underwater friends start dying off en masse. The simulation time lapses the underwater holocaust down to an impressionable interval. […]
And what where the results ? Participants test scores about ocean acidification after the simulation increased by more than 100%. The information was tested and retention demonstrated more than three weeks later. The more time participants spent engaged in the simulation, the more information they retained.
One of the most interesting and unexpected result is that VR seems to increase both knowledge (especially because VR makes your body moving — knowledge being organized spatially, it fits well) and empathy. When it comes to users appreciation, it was universally deemed positive, in particular because it raised awareness on ocean acidification. However, a less rejoicing result is that VR doesn’t alter a fervid commitment to climate denial. This doesn’t mean that if would be irrelevant to try to show climate deniers how what they like (be it hunting or… whatever Facebook might know) could concretely be impacted by climate change.
If on the whole, using VR to raise awareness on climate is quite likely to work, how many people can it reach ? Let’s have a quick look at Facebook’s figures : there are 1.74 billion mobile active users in the world. It’s quite hard to know how many people are using Oculus products, but my guess is that the range of magnitude is tens of millions. Probably something like fifty millions (based on the total number of active VR users/Oculus market share), but I could be wrong.
Even in the less ambitions scenarios, such pro-environment experiences could help change the minds of millions of people. Which sounds worth exploring. But why would Facebook do it in the first place ?
How it would fit Facebook’s business model
Advertisements represent a primary source of revenue for Facebook. In 2016, they accounted or 97% of the company’s overall revenues. Over the last few years, the company has made some moves towards revenue sources diversification, especially by selling hardware products. And that’s where Oculus comes in.
Today, in Facebook’s financial results, Oculus revenues are included into a category called “Payments and other fees”. According to CFO Dave Wehner, revenue from that arm of the business was just $165 million in the first three months of 2019. That means less than 2% of Facebook’s overall revenue for the quarter.
Recent figures tend to indicate a decline in FB hardware product’s sales. If that’s too short-term to be really meaningful, the least we can say is that it’s tough for Facebook to come up with new ways to make money. In this situation, developing a breathtaking pro-environment experience could help Facebook to sell more VR headsets in the end :
- For non-VR users: by placing the experience on their Facebook news feed and inviting them to “have a more real experience” by discovering Oculus products.
- For VR users: by placing the experience on their Oculus homepage and then in the various Oculus experiences, thus feeding the current Oculus content, engagement and retention strategies.
Looking at current sources of revenues of Facebook (Ads, Payments, Workplace, Oculus), it’s quite unlikely that they would make money by selling the technology behind the simulation experience. They would probably have it done by someone else and then buy the rights (like for other Oculus games/programs, I guess), or establish a partnership with a non-commercial actor.
In the end, it’s not likely to change drastically Facebook financial results. But it could probably be a net positive, not to mention non-financial results.
Tracking results
What’s interesting is that Facebook is in a very good position to know whether such kind of messages have an impact or not. They can measure what posts you like or completely ignore in the following weeks/months/years of the experience (did you like more-pro environment posts, for instance ?). Which means that they can help to know whether pro-environment VR experiences work at a big scale or not.
When it comes to their interests, they can easily know if it increases Oculus headsets sales, or engagement on the Oculus platform.
Potential undesirable effects
Even though pro-environment VR experiences seems to build empathy and drive action, some points should be given special attention.
- This could be seen as manipulation, which could annoy users (especially climate deniers) and encourage them to leave the platform and not changing their mind on anything (or even reinforcing their beliefs).
- The game/streaming industry consumes a lot of data, which becomes increasingly problematic on the environmental level. It should be ensured that the sale of more VR helmets, combined with the production and consumption of very high quality games and videos, does not contradict environmental protection. That said, showing marginally a pro-environment experience doesn’t look like so much counter-productive in terms of (stone throwing) estimated net environmental impact.
Ethical considerations
In his article on algorithmic paternalism, Martin Guibert deals with ethical issues related to the use of pro-environment AI-based messages, making the distinction between soft (using tech to modify beliefs and behaviours for noble purposes) versus strong paternalism (persuade someone so strongly that their behaviour changes in a way that limits their autonomy).
The idea presented in this article was a case of soft pro-environment paternalism, as it means to modify your view on climate change. If Facebook did it while 1) explaining the approach 2) being backed by legitimate authorities (universities, NGOs, governments) 3) using truthful data, it would seem very ethically acceptable.
Climate change (and particularly extreme risks) is one of the major problems of our time. The whole positive outcomes of pro-environment messages seem very very higher than the negative consequences of displaying such messages. So why don’t we start ?
