Polar Opposites: Ice Then, Water Now

March 25, 2025

It’s a busy week at Beam, but we thought come hell or high water, we need to get our second newsletter out (as promised). We are having a small launch event in Stellenbosch on Thursday (27th of March) and our team is gathering here from different parts of the world to celebrate and figure out what comes next.

But back to water…

It seems as if our very first project in 2025 may be focused on water. More specifically, on using behavioral science messages in an accessible film to influence water-safety behavior in vulnerable households. When we started Beam, we thought about all the ways we could use different communication to share research findings at the end of a research project. Yet, here we are, using communication strategies at the heart of a research project. We’ll keep you posted.

Saturday (22nd of March) was World Water Day. Beam commemorated World Water Day by combining it with our South African celebration of Human Rights Day.

This year’s United Nations World Water Day theme is slightly atypical, taking us closer to more extreme climate change concerns. The theme is “Glacier Preservation”. And we should be worried about this in a period where one of the world’s largest glacier floods took place in Greenland. 

It is the first time the United Nations has turned the focus of its World Water Day to glaciers. It signals growing concern about what the loss of melting glaciers mean for the world. The melting of glaciers generates impacts that ripple beyond just the loss of the glacier itself - it generates negative consequences for ecosystems, economies and communities. 

According to data from the World Glacier Monitoring Service, 25 to 30 percent of sea level rise comes from glacier melt (United Nations, 2025).

Melting snowcaps are causing sea levels to rise about one millimetre higher every year. Every additional millimetre will mean the flooding of spaces where 200,000 to 300,000 persons live every year.

Showcase

The body of knowledge on effective water communication is slowly evolving. And our global and local socioeconomic contexts help shape what and how we can communicate.

Cape Town’s Day Zero crisis (2015–2016) provided a real-world test of how different messages influence water consumption during extreme scarcity. A behavioural intervention placed targeted messages (or "nudges") on municipal bills from November 2015 to April 2016, assessing their impact across income groups.

Results showed that behavioural messaging led to a modest reduction in water use (0.6–
1.3%) over six months, but only among higher-income households. The most effective message acknowledged households' water-saving efforts (social recognition), followed by one urging action for the public good. Low-income households showed no measurable change in water consumption behaviour.

Context and message delivery mattered. While municipal bills were a cost-effective way to reach many people, their impact depended on whether recipients engaged with them.

But we can’t be all doom and gloom. We need inspiration and celebration of beauty to move to action on preserving the environment.

As glaciers melt, they leave their animal life at risk for starvation and ultimately extinction. One such animal is the polar bear.

  1. If you haven’t yet encountered the wonderful book “Polar bear, polar bear, what do you hear”, by Bill Martin Jnr. and Eric Carle (published in 1991), please make time to find it.

1   Brick, K.,  De Martino, S. & Visser, M. 2023. Behavioural nudges for water conservation in unequal settings: Experimental evidence from Cape Town. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. 121: 102852.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeem.2023.102852

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