Description
My sister Sarah and I started ClimateActionHow.com in September 2021 for BTYSTE 2022. It was a WordPress site for people who wanted to act on climate change but did not know where to start.
We registered the domain through Register365, set up shared hosting and built the site with WordPress and Divi. It had three sections: Educate, Inspire and Action. We collected roughly 200 climate-action tips for Educate and grouped them into six categories: At Home, When Outdoors, At Work, When Travelling, When Buying and Collective Action. Each post gave a short explanation and linked to sources with more detail. Inspire grouped videos around three questions: why climate change mattered, what people could do and what was already working. Action listed eighteen climate charities and organisations.
We made a custom homepage, header, footer, search-results page, category pages, post templates, menu navigation, logo and responsive layouts. We planned to write every article ourselves. It was far too slow. We switched to curating existing material, writing short credited summaries and linking readers to the original sources.
We also contacted scientists, politicians, activists and other people we thought might contribute short videos. One tailored video came back. We used existing videos for the rest of Inspire.
The Premise
Climate information was everywhere. Practical guidance was scattered across hundreds of repetitive pages. The most visible advice was usually to buy an electric car, install solar panels or go vegan. Those suggestions were out of reach for many people, and most of the material was written for adults. We thought a centralised site organised around ordinary situations would make the available information easier to use.
The site had a Collective Action category and a full page of organisations. In our presentation we talked about voting, protest, work, activism and joining a larger movement. In the project video, Sarah said that responsibility was shared and that some people had more influence than others.
Most of the site still consisted of individual actions. We never resolved when those actions led people towards collective pressure and when they drew attention away from governments and large companies.
Evaluation
We presented the first version at BTYSTE in January 2022 without testing the website. Sarah had proposed user testing or a survey. I overruled her. The feedback we received was that the project lacked evaluation.
I entered a revised version at the TUS Midwest regional SciFest that April and presented it alone. It included a preliminary survey and a post-use survey. The poster records 159 students in the first survey and 92 after using the site. Of those 92, 77.2% said they learned something, 82.6% said they better understood what they could do, 73.9% said access to a resource like this would help them make more climate-conscious decisions, and 64.1% said they would use the site again.
These were immediate self-reports. There was no control group, behavioural follow-up or emissions measurement. The report says the same people were asked to use the site and complete the second survey, but the surviving material does not show how their responses were matched. The surveys measured understanding and perceived usefulness after a short visit. They did not show that anyone changed their behaviour.
The SciFest report called the website a proof of concept and said it did not yet contain enough published material to be a reliable resource. The revised entry received the Fenergo Communication Award.
Collaboration
I was a bad collaborator on this project. I rewrote Sarah's work without agreeing changes with her, including while she slept. I overruled her proposal to test the site. During one practice judging I kept cutting in to correct answers that were not wrong. Ms Farrell stood behind me and signalled to Sarah that she was fine.
Sarah explained the three-part structure, the Educate build, the Inspire outreach and change of plan, the Action page and our proposed future work. In the video she described the overload of scattered information, the dominance of expensive changes, the need for a climate-conscious mentality and the fact that some people had more influence than others. The proposal, BTYSTE report, slides and video all carry both our names.
The SciFest report, slides, poster and award record carry only mine. I revised and presented that version alone. The website and original argument were joint work.
The award did not repair how I treated Sarah. ClimateActionHow.com belongs here as a project by Sarah and Seán O'Sullivan.
Archive
As of August 2026, the domain no longer resolves. These are the surviving project materials:
