Behavioural scientist Nathan Wang-Ly joins the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response to bring a practitioner’s understanding of decision-making to climate risk education.
Nathan Wang-Ly has spent the last several years designing behavioural science interventions inside Australia’s major banks. Now, he’s bringing what he learned there to a new role developing training for climate risk professionals who not only understand the science, but know how to wield it in the corporate world.
Can you share a bit about yourself and your background?
Before coming to UNSW, I worked in applied behavioural science roles in the banking sector. That gave me experience running real-world experiments, working with large datasets and translating academic research into tools that organisations can actually use.
Alongside that industry work, I completed research looking at how people make saving and spending decisions when the future feels uncertain — which, as it turns out, is a useful lens for thinking about climate risk.
What’s the key insight?
Uncertainty doesn’t affect everyone the same way. There’s a common assumption that when people feel uncertain, they become cautious and plan more carefully. Sometimes that’s true.
But what I found is that it depends on whether people believe a goal is achievable. If they think it is, uncertainty can make them more conservative and forward-looking. If they think it isn’t, uncertainty pushes them to disengage and focus on what they can control right now.
That pattern shows up in finance — and it’s highly relevant to climate risk. Climate change is full of uncertainty: long timeframes, probabilities, trade-offs. If people — whether individuals or organisations — feel that meaningful action is out of reach, then inaction becomes a rational response.
From a behavioural perspective, the challenge isn’t just explaining the science better. It’s ensuring that people can see a pathway from evidence to action within their constraints.
What did working inside large organisations teach you about behaviour change?
That context matters far more than motivation. In corporate settings, people are busy, decisions are fragmented, and there are always competing priorities. You can’t assume someone will sit down and carefully think through a problem just because the evidence is good.
What works is designing systems that make better decisions easier — reducing friction, improving timing, and understanding when people are actually paying attention. That’s something you only really grasp once you’ve tried to apply behavioural science outside a lab.
What will your role as Online Program Director involve?
I’m designing new online programmes in business psychology, as well as climate risk and sustainability. These are aimed at professionals — people working in government, industry and policy — who need to make decisions under uncertainty. The focus is on practicality. Participants should finish with tools they can use immediately: how to scope a problem, design an intervention, and evaluate whether it worked.
We talk a lot about climate science and climate communication, but less about how decisions actually get made inside organisations. People want to know: how do I take this evidence into a meeting, a policy process or an investment decision? What does a behavioural project look like in practice? Who needs to be involved, and what does success look like? Those are the gaps I’m interested in addressing.
What does success look like?
I want to see people leave these programmes better equipped to act — not just more informed. If participants can design better projects, ask better questions, and work more effectively within the constraints they face, that’s a meaningful outcome. Climate risk doesn’t fail because the science is weak; it fails when we don’t know how to use it.
How did your background in behavioural science influence the way you operated inside large organisations?
Climate risk is something organisations are expected to act on now. Regulators, investors and boards are asking for decisions — often before there is perfect information. That puts a lot of pressure on climate risk professionals. They’re expected to interpret complex science, translate it for non-experts, and make recommendations that carry financial and reputational consequences.
What’s often missing is training in how those decisions actually get made inside organisations — how trade-offs are weighed, how uncertainty is handled, and how evidence moves through a system, which is something behavioural science helps you understand.