What if a traffic light could accelerate climate action?

When a traffic light turns green, you don’t think. You go. When it comes to climate action, we’ve been standing still far too long. That moving mentality is exactly what the climate transition needs: less thinking, more going. What if we could hijack the one signal that already gets people moving: the traffic light’s “green = go“?

In the night leading up to Earth day, we headed out to transform Rotterdam’s traffic lights into planet Earths. On the day itself, commuters were confronted with a planet lighting up when the traffic light turned green. 

Green-means-go isn’t a decision; it’s a reflex. Your brain even has dedicated “traffic light neurons”, a gate in the cortex that fires on green, sending the go-signal to your foot before your conscious mind has caught up. At the same time, red’s low-level alarm switches off: tension drops, and you shift into a calm, ready state. The action runs ahead of the thought. With climate, we have the opposite problem: endless deliberation, almost no movement.

By attaching Earth to that instinctive go-signal, we borrow the reflex — so the next green light (even without a sticker) carries a memory of the planet, and the next planet a little of that let’s go feeling.