Global Environmental Psychology

Why Do (Or Don’t) People Protect Nature? Insights From Conservation Practice and Environmental Psychology to Respond to the Biodiversity Crisis

Lily M. van Eeden — 2025-02-21

Understanding and shaping human action towards nature conservation is critical to reversing the biodiversity crisis. Psychological science provides tools for understanding individual and collective behaviours, but also for understanding how the behaviour of individuals can drive human–environment systems transitions. As researchers and practitioners spanning distinct disciplines, we draw on our collective knowledge in environmental psychology, systems thinking, economics, and conservation biology, along with experience in practice and government, to consider reasons why people do (or don’t) protect nature. We outline dimensions important to fostering individual conservation behaviour and systems transformation. Such individual dimensions include values, personality traits, and psychological distancing. Broader system influences include cultural, economic, and environmental factors that shape the way people interact with, and care for, nature. Finally, we describe potential tools that may support increasing conservation actions and systems transformation, including strengthening connection with and access to nature, values-based and solutions-focused framing, collective action, and propagating optimism.

World Beliefs Predict Self-Reported Sustainable Behaviors Beyond Big Five Personality Traits and Political Ideology

Janna Hämpke — 2025-02-21

Generalized beliefs about the world—termed ‘primal world beliefs’ or ‘primals’—have been hypothesized to affect behavior, since they contain information which influences the perceived costs, benefits, and justifications for different behaviors. For example, people who see the world as highly improvable may view prosocial behaviors as having more benefits and therefore be more inclined to work harder on making things better. Three preregistered studies (N = 1,534 US participants) investigated the relationship between primals and several measures of people’s propensity toward sustainable behavior. Beliefs that the world is less hierarchical, but more improvable, cooperative, harmless, meaningful, and abundant were weakly to moderately associated with self-reported ethically-minded consumer behavior, pro-environmental behavior, and behavioral intentions. These relationships were largely robust to controlling for Big Five traits and political ideology, although some of the relationships were subsumed by the more general belief that the world is good. Changes in two world beliefs (cooperative, harmless) over a three-week period weakly predicted pro-environmental behavior intentions when controlling for people’s previously reported pro-environmental behavior. These correlational findings suggest some possible avenues for future research: if these beliefs are found to be causally prior to environmental attitudes, they may offer a promising target for interventions aimed at increasing sustainable behavior.

How Affinity With Places Affects the Indirect Experience of Climate Extreme Weather Events

Elias Keller — 2025-02-21

When news media talk about climate change, they often report on extreme weather in places around the world. One factor that may explain perceptions of such reports and reactions to them is people’s relationships with affected places. We test a framework of place affinity, as indicated by several place beliefs, to describe these people-place relationships. Based on previous research and two pilot studies, we employed a three-condition between-participants experiment to test whether place affinity helps explain reactions to news reports. Participants (N = 972) were either shown one of two reports on extreme flooding events in high-affinity and low-affinity countries or a general article on climate change and flooding (control condition). Reading about extreme weather in a high-affinity place invoked stronger emotional reactions than for other conditions. There were no differences in risk perception, policy support or behaviour between conditions. Participants’ open responses to news articles provided evidence of emotion-focused, problem-focused and meaning-focused strategies, as well as an absence of emotion-regulation. Our study thus contributes to the literature by testing our theoretical framework of place affinity and by investigating factors shaping the effectiveness of climate coverage.

Do I Perceive That We as a Community Can Persist, Adapt Flexibly, and Positively Transform? The Relationship Between Collective Transilience and Community-Based Adaptation

Valentina Lozano Nasi — 2024-04-30

Climate change is happening and has negative impacts on communities. To adapt to climate change risks, people need to take action to protect, not only themselves, but also their community. We study whether collective transilience predicts community-based adaptation, such as joining a community initiative to protect the community from climate change risks. Collective transilience reflects the extent to which people perceive they can persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform as a community in the face of climate change. Two studies (in the United States and the Netherlands) showed that, as expected, higher collective transilience is associated with increased engagement in different examples of community-based adaptation, even when controlling for individual transilience (i.e., the perceived capacity to persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of climate change as an individual). Notably, collective transilience was the only significant predictor of individual adaptation behaviours, corroborating the relevance of examining transilience at the collective level to promote widespread adaptation. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

“System Change, not Climate Change”: Effective Environmental Policies and State Repression Moderate the Relationship Between Psychological Predictors and Environmental Collective Action

Mete Sefa Uysal — 2024-04-30

Social psychological research on environmental collective action often overlooks the facilitating or hindering impact of a country’s context. The institutional attitudes of governments toward environmental issues can play a crucial role in mobilizing environmental activism. To explore how individual and contextual factors interplay for engagement in environmental collective action, we conducted multilevel modelling using data from 12 countries (n = 18,746). While the engagement in environmental collective action was predicted by stronger environmental concern and environmental efficacy beliefs, the strength of these relationships was moderated by macro-level contextual variables related to political governance. In countries with more effective environmental policies, both environmental concern and environmental efficacy beliefs had a stronger impact on collective action compared to the countries with inadequate environmental governance. Moreover, our findings indicated that environmental concern is less likely to translate into environmental collective action in repressive countries. Findings are discussed within the frameworks of community resilience, identity, empowerment, and repression.

How Climate Protesters Perceive Injustice and Justify Breaking the Law: Qualitative Interviews With Extinction Rebellion

Amarins Jansma — 2024-04-30

Facing the looming threat of the climate crisis, climate movements using strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience have recently attracted attention. To better understand what drives such groups to protest possibly in law-violating ways, we conducted qualitative interviews among 106 people involved with Extinction Rebellion in the Netherlands. These interviews had two main goals: (1) to explore the relevance of perceived injustice as a motivation for protesters to participate in climate action and (2) to determine protesters’ justifications for breaking the law with civil disobedient protest. Our findings show that perceived injustice was an important motivation for the protesters we interviewed. Specifically, they perceived injustice in their personal futures, government actions (or lack thereof), the unequal distribution of climate change impacts and responsibility, police treatment, and societal systems. Furthermore, protesters indicated a willingness to break certain laws with civil disobedient protests in a nonviolent manner, but their definitions of nonviolence varied. In particular, protesters legitimized disruptive actions by citing the current urgency of addressing what is at stake, future moral goals, and the past effectiveness of disobedient strategies. These findings help to understand how climate protesters’ injustice perceptions and their intentions to participate in disruptive actions are shaped in today’s society.

It’s Getting Dark, But We Will See: Gaining Collective Momentum in Face of Existential Environmental Threat

Immo Fritsche — 2024-04-30

Collective action to protect the environment is increasingly moving into the focus of environmental psychology. Also policy makers are well-advised to consider the dynamics of collective environmental action as a vehicle to swift ecological transformations of societies. A sense of collective environmental agency (vs. treating citizens as reluctant consumers) is proposed to drive people supporting collective ecological transformations and engaging in personal and political action against large-scale environmental crises, such as climate change. The Global Environmental Psychology special section, “Responding to the Socio-Ecological Crisis: Collective Action and Activism”, presents nine empirical research articles that help to assess the antecedences and consequences of collective environmental agency. The present commentary discusses what the specific contributions of these papers are to better understand the emergence of collective environmental agency and what their implications are for future research in the field of social environmental psychology.

Being Positively Moved by Climate Protest Predicts Peaceful Collective Action

Helen Landmann — 2024-04-30

People can be motivated to engage in collective action for climate protection because they are angry about an injustice or because they are emotionally moved by the idea that they can achieve something together. However, previous research on emotions and collective action has not distinguished between being positively and being negatively moved and between normative and non-normative collective action. To address this gap, we conducted a field study in Germany with activists and non-activists of Fridays for Future (N = 223). Participants reported their appraisals, feelings and intentions related to the climate crisis and the Fridays for Future protests. Being positively moved predicted intentions to engage in normative collective action (signing petitions, participating in demonstrations) but not intentions to participate in non-normative collective action (involving damage to property or risk of personal injury). Being negatively moved did not significantly predict either of these collective action intentions. This suggests that the motivational effect of being moved on collective action is specific to being positively moved and to normative collective action. Acceptance of non-normative collective action was predicted by perceptions of injustice and low collective efficacy beliefs. Thus, non-normative collective action for climate protection seems to be considered when peaceful protest is perceived as ineffective.

“The Future Will Be Green, or Not at All”: How Positive (Utopian) and Negative (Dystopian) Thoughts About the Future Shape Collective Climate Action

Sean Daysh — 2024-04-30

The global movement to combat climate change is focused on pressuring governments, industry and other key decision-makers to take urgent action to mitigate the causes and impacts of climate change. The movement has played an important role in global transformation and change. What motivates people to engage in collective climate action? The current study examines the role of prospection, that is, thoughts and emotions about the future, in shaping collective climate action. Two studies (Study 1: N = 413; Study 2: N = 440) test experimentally the effects of positive (utopian) and negative (dystopian) future-oriented thinking on collective climate action via future-oriented emotions (hope and fear). Participants were assigned to engage in one of two imagination tasks focussing either on a utopian society that has adapted to climate change, or a dystopian society, or a control condition (passive or active). Across both studies, utopian thinking was found to indirectly affect collective climate action by evoking feelings of hope. Additionally, an indirect effect of dystopian thinking on collective climate action through fear was found in Study 2. These results suggest that both forms of future-oriented thinking may have the potential to increase collective climate action intentions by evoking an emotional response.

How Dare We? The Relation Between Language Use, Global Identity, and Climate Activism

Laura S. Loy — 2024-04-30

Identifying with and caring for people all over the world (i.e., a global identity) is positively related to pro-environmental behaviour. However, less is known how to foster such a global identity. Drawing on social identity theory, we investigated whether using inclusive (vs. exclusive) language in the context of demonstrations for climate protection increases people’s global identity. Moreover, we examined whether inclusive language use strengthens people’s intentions to engage in pro-environmental activism and their pro-environmental policy support, while reducing their denial of climate change implications, through a heightened global identity. In our pre-registered online experiment with a convenience sample mostly living in Germany (N = 307), we found no significant impacts of language use. Language effects did also not depend on people’s prior identification with the climate movement. However, our results show that, in line with our assumptions, the stronger people’s global identity, the more they intended to become pro-environmentally active, the more they supported pro-environmental policies, and the less they denied their impact on climate change.