February update: AI, climate, and animal rights research

Image by Alisdare Hickson from Woolwich, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to the latest update from Social Change Lab. As we move into 2026, we've been busy on a range of new projects spanning climate, AI safety and animal rights activism. Here's what we've been working on:

What might persuade people to act on AI?

We recently put a large randomised controlled trial into the field examining what issues and messages are most effective at mobilising public action on AI safety. With AI evolving rapidly and being integrated into systems with little public oversight, and tech companies holding unprecedented power and influence, we believe significant public involvement in shaping the direction of AI development is crucial. Our study tests carefully designed vignettes presenting different AI harm and risk scenarios to around 3,500 people across the UK, covering everything from job loss to existential threat, automated weapons to cognitive decline.

While the full experimental findings will be available soon, we shared some first findings from an open question in the survey which revealed fascinating insights. When we asked participants how they feel about AI development, almost no one skipped the question—extremely unusual for optional questions. This suggests people have thoughts they want to express and perhaps few meaningful opportunities to do so.

Key themes that emerged: Job displacement dominates concerns (around 15% mentioned it unprompted), followed by environmental harms like AI's energy and water consumption (roughly 5%), then misinformation, surveillance, and privacy concerns (around 4% each). Interestingly, existential risk from superintelligent AI was rarely mentioned (around 1%)—suggesting this simply isn't on most people's radar.

Most people expressed ambivalence—simultaneously excited and worried about AI—which seems like a rational response to a genuinely complicated situation. While fear and worry dominated, we found relatively little anger or moral outrage, the emotions that typically drive people to protest and organise. The exception was strong concerns around child safety, particularly referencing Grok's nudification tool, where there was clear moral outrage.

Keep an eye out for our  full experimental findings (coming soon) and read our first findings here.

Image by Beckett LeClair https://betterimagesofai.org https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Evaluating four years of Green New Deal Rising

Last year, we worked with Green New Deal Rising—a movement fighting to stop climate change and win a Green New Deal—on a deep evaluation of their first four years. They're releasing this as a five-part series on their Substack.

The first instalment explores how organising can be a superpower, but only when paired with genuine investment in diverse leadership and intentional culture-building. Key insights include the importance of being explicit about your movement’s principles and DNA from the beginning, actively nurturing culture as movements grow, and building structures that can last through both peaks and quieter periods of mobilisation. Read part one here.

Major new initiative on factory farming

We attended a meeting of animal advocacy groups hosted by Project Slingshot—a major new initiative aiming to turn public disgust about factory farming into public pressure. We've conducted extensive polling in the UK and US for the campaign to understand public sentiment on factory farming and the industry, and to help shape campaign strategy (soon we will be sharing a report with the most interesting and actionable insights from these polls). The campaign launches later this year, and we're excited to see our research informing what promises to be a significant mobilisation effort. 

Commons Conversation podcast

Our Director of Research & Development, Cathy Rogers, appeared on the Commons Conversation podcast. Sophie Hartley from the Commons Social Change Library chatted with Cathy about how to effectively campaign against the fossil fuel industry. They discussed two complementary reports: our 'Strategies and Tactics to Curb the Fossil Fuel Industry' and Sophie's 'Tactics Used by Fossil Fuel Companies to Suppress Critique and Obstruct Climate Action' Listen to the episode here.

Where next for the climate movement?

We’ve started a series of discussion papers exploring where the climate might focus its energy and resources next. Our first paper, co-authored with Maciej Muskat from Greenpeace International, examined how extreme weather events - floods, wildfires, and storms - are creating a new generation of climate activists. Read our op-ed on this in Waging Nonviolence: How to turn extreme weather tragedies into climate victories. 

Our goal is for each paper to examine a different frontier for climate organising: taking on the insurance industry, calling for taxes on the super rich, making polluters pay, or building alliances with the AI safety movement. We're developing these papers in collaboration with thinkers and strategists from across the movement, and our goal is to spark debate and help organisers make choices about where to invest limited resources. 

If you have an idea for a paper in the series - get in touch!  

The impact of large scale disruptive activism 

One of our regular collaborators, Dr Ben Kenward, has released preliminary results from a new study with Clara Vandeweerdt adopting a stimulus sampling approach: they selected 100 news articles about disruptive climate protest semi-randomly (such that those with greater readership were more likely to be selected) to estimate the effect of reading an average article about this topic. They found that the propensity of mentioning the environment as one of the top issues facing the country was boosted, support for climate policies increased, but environmental identity (seeing oneself as an environmentalist) was reduced. Read the preliminary results here. 

Don't Be Silenced: Protecting our right to protest and campaign

Last week we attended 'Don't Be Silenced', a conference hosted by Speak Out and Quakers in Britain addressing the existential threat to UK civic space. UK civic space has been under threat for more than a decade through legislative and policy measures, an increasingly politicised Charity Commission, and assaults by right-wing media, think tanks, and MPs. Xenophobic and racist rhetoric from senior decision-makers has emboldened the far-right, making it even harder for marginalised groups to speak out safely. This is a topic we explored in our research on attitudes to the right to protest in the UK. 

We were pleased to attend the conference which brought together people across the social and environmental justice sector. As checks on power which have historically kept us safe are being removed, and with the rise of authoritarianism globally, defending the right to campaign has never been more important.

Thank you

We're grateful to all our supporters, funders and partners who make this work possible. Your support means we can keep doing this vital work.

For more information about our work, visit socialchangelab.org or contact us at info@socialchangelab.org. And please consider making a donation—it makes a huge difference.

All the best,

The Social Change Lab Team