RFP – Behavior Science Consultant

Background

1. Scoop the dog poop: Keep harmful nutrients and fecal coli form bacteria from washing into the river when it rains.

2. Reduce lawn fertilizers: Excess amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus create algae blooms that reduce dissolved oxygen in the water marine life needs.

3. Keep pollutants out of storm drains: Motor oil, antifreeze, soaps, and other pollutants flow directly into the river without being treated.

4. No grease in the sink: Grease is one of the top causes of clogged sewer systems, leading to sewer overflows and the potential for raw sewage to wash into the river when it rains.

5. Don’t feed the geese: Feeding the geese and ducks discourages migration and sends excess levels of untreated fecal bacteria directly into the river.

6. Avoid single-use plastics: Plastic pollution increases our flood risk and causes damage to marine ecosystems as well as shipping, transport, and recreational vessels.

7. Don’t flush medicine: Municipal sewage treatment plants can’t fully break down flushed medicines, which harm aquatic organisms and wildlife when they enter the river.

1. Identify the key behaviors that will have the greatest impact to achieve your goals. There are thousands of things a homeowner can do to help the environment. Only a few will make a real difference to reduce the specific problems on our specific river.

2. Promote the benefits and remove the barriers for your target audience to make these behavior changes. If it’s too hard and there is nothing rewarding about it, only the die-hards will bother (they would have anyway).

3. Expect to generate a level of goodwill and openness not possible with a regulatory approach. Honor your participant’s trust. It’s astounding how much a business will do to help – once they trust you not to blame them – so don’t blame or report them.

4. Keep entry FREE or your audience might dismiss your pitch as a gimmick to raise money. Your fundraising team will want you to charge these stars just to be in your program. They’ll run if you do (charge for intensive assistance later, but not for entry).

5. Set the bar low for entry but give high-visibility recognition. Busy principles suddenly became anxious to get involved when school superintendents began expecting to see River Star School banners by front doors.

6. Provide incentives to motivate more than entry-level effort. We help homeowners and businesses pay for the big, hard projects. When we ask teachers to work with us all year long, we look for stipends for them.

7. Overcome the knowledge barrier with hands-on, one-on-one advice. Not many people know how to take a soil test, even if they think it’s simple. Show them, even if it means sending someone to their homes.

The program has seen large success with over 7,000 homes currently pledged. However, over the years new participation has dwindled. Tabling at community events and presenting to civic leagues and community groups no longer yield the recruitment numbers they once did. With the opening of ERP’s new headquarters, the Ryan Resilience Lab on Colley Avenue in Norfolk, ERP is now more well-known than ever. Now, recruitment mainly comes from visitors to the Lab and ERP-hosted events, rather than from previous outreach methods, suggesting that ERP may be reaching a critical mass for program participation.

That said, the nature of the program tends to select for more affluent groups – property owners, often waterfront, who can afford to make changes to be more environmentally friendly. Although participation in the program is open to renters, apartment dwellers, and homeowners alike, some of the behaviors aren’t applicable to people who don’t have yards or dogs, and people who don’t own land can’t benefit from the cost share program. These characteristics tend to correlate with underserved communities, which also experience more adverse environmental impacts from pollution. Figure 1 demonstrates the lack of overlap between RSH participants and high socially- and environmentally vulnerable

census tracts (The Elizabeth River Mapping Tool). Areas with high RSH density tend to exclude the vulnerable areas outlined in red.

Furthermore, the most pressing issues in the Elizabeth River watershed have evolved since the program was launched nearly 15 years ago. Now, issues of climate change, sea level rise, and high-tide flooding are far more salient than ever before, so much so that ERP chose to prioritize sea level rise and climate change resilience in their most recent Watershed Action Plan published in 2022. Hampton Roads faces the highest rate of relative sea level rise on the east coast, second only to New Orleans in the nation. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that Hampton Roads could see 85-185 high- tide flooding days per year by 2050, compared to an average of 15 days over the last 5 years, which equates to a 5- to 12-fold increase in a 30-year timespan.

Tidal flooding poses a huge threat to the water quality of the Elizabeth River. A citizen science research program out of Old Dominion University called “Measure the Muck” has found that the “entire [total maximum daily] load allocation for nitrogen to the Lafayette River (a tributary of the Elizabeth) could be delivered during a single tidal flooding event,” which is not accounted for in models used to predict water quality in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. While the RSH program’s current 7 steps are helpful for water quality, they may no longer yield the highest impact to achieve ERP’s goals.