Abstract
In this paper, we consider a quite general class of reaction-diffusion equations with cubic nonlinearities and with random Neumann boundary conditions. We derive rigorously amplitude equations, using the natural separation of time-scales near a change of stability and investigate whether additive degenerate noise and random boundary conditions can lead to stabilization of the solution of the stochastic partial differential equation or not. The nonlinear heat equation (Ginzburg-Landau equation) is used to illustrate our result. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.