Earth Day is an annual celebration that honors the achievements of the environmental movement and raises awareness of the need to protect Earth’s natural resources for future generations.

The first Earth Day was held onApril 22, 1970. This year, it’s on Saturday 22nd April.

It has a theme tune, too. The song, "Earth Anthem," was written by Indian poet Abhay Kumar in 2013 and has since been recorded in all official UN languages.

It's estimated that every year, about a billion people participate in Earth Day in their own ways, big and small. That makes up about 15% of the world's population. This also makes Earth Day the largest secular celebration in the world.

Each year Earth Day has a theme. This year it is “Invest in Our Planet”, a continuation of the 2022 theme, designed to persuade businesses, governments and citizens around the world of the need to invest in our planet to improve our environment and give our descendants a better and safer future.

What is Prolific doing to contribute?

Prolific is a remote-first business. Most people work from home rather than commuting, which reduces our carbon footprint. We aren’t in the office as much, so most of our work is online. This means we have minimal paper documents.

Each month we give a monthly contribution based on £10 per person in the business with Mossy Earth to offset carbon related to traveling that may take place for events and conferences.

Exciting eco-studies that were powered by Prolific

Prolific enables researchers to conduct studies with 130,000+ vetted participants. Here are just a few examples of Prolific-powered research related to this year's Earth Day theme.

Irregular stimulus distribution increases the negative footprint illusion

Eco-certified ‘green’ buildings with low carbon footprints are helping to fight the effects of climate change. But how do people perceive the carbon footprint of these buildings, given their spatial distributions in a community?

This study explores something called the negative footprint illusion. Can the way these buildings are distributed influence how people think about the carbon footprint of communities?

The study found that if buildings were distributed in an irregular way, it increased the magnitude of the negative footprint illusion. It also discusses potential applied implications for urban planning of green buildings.

A cautious note on the relationship between social mindfulness and concern with environmental protection

A comprehensive study explored if being mindful of others in the present moment (social mindfulness) is related to how much a country cares about protecting the environment (measured by the EPI). The study found that across 31 countries, there was a strong relationship between social mindfulness and EPI.

However, when a group of researchers looked more closely, they found that this relationship was weaker when they took into account a country's wealth. And it was mostly driven by three influential countries. They also found that their study didn’t look at how social mindfulness affects concern for the environment at an individual level.

So, they conducted their own study with 600 Prolific participants from the US. They discovered that the relationship between social mindfulness and concern for the environment was weak, even after taking into account other factors related to being kind and considerate. Their conclusion: we need to be careful not to assume that a relationship at the country level will be the same at the individual level.

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If you're looking to conduct your own research into the environment, or would love to take part in studies like the ones above, sign up today.

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