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  • Perspective
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Realizing the full potential of behavioural science for climate change mitigation

Nature Climate Change volume 14, pages 322–330 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Behavioural science has yielded insights about the actions of individuals, particularly as consumers, that affect climate change. Behaviours in other spheres of life remain understudied. In this Perspective, we propose a collaborative research agenda that integrates behavioural science insights across multiple disciplines. To this end, we offer six recommendations for optimizing the quality and impact of research on individual climate behaviour. The recommendations are united by a shift towards more solutions-focused research that is directly useful to citizens, policymakers and other change agents. Achieving this vision will require overcoming challenges such as the limited funding for behavioural and social sciences and structural barriers within and beyond the academic system that impede collaborations across disciplines.

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Fig. 1: Six recommendations for behavioural science to study individual climate behaviour.

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Acknowledgements

K.S.N. gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Carlsberg Foundation, grant number CF22-1056. V.C. acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc Mobility Fellowship (P500PS_202935). S.B. acknowledges support from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SI/502093-01). T.D. was supported in part by Michigan AgBio Research. F.L. was supported by an FWO postdoctoral fellowship (12U1221N).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Kristian S. Nielsen & Jan M. Bauer

  2. Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Viktoria Cologna

  3. Department of Sociology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Sebastian Berger

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Cameron Brick

  5. Department of Psychology, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Elverum, Norway

    Cameron Brick

  6. Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Thomas Dietz

  7. Environmental Science and Policy Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Thomas Dietz

  8. Faculty of Psychology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Ulf J. J. Hahnel

  9. Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Ulf J. J. Hahnel

  10. Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, University of Hohenheim, Hohenheim, Germany

    Laura Henn

  11. Behavioral Economics and Engineering Group, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Florian Lange

  12. Social and Environmental Research Institute, Shelburne Falls, MA, USA

    Paul C. Stern

  13. Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Kimberly S. Wolske

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  1. Kristian S. Nielsen
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  2. Viktoria Cologna
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  4. Sebastian Berger
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Contributions

K.S.N., V.C., J.M.B., S.B., C.B., T.D., U.J.J.H., L.H., F.L., P.C.S. and K.S.W. contributed to conceptualizing the research and writing the paper. All authors approved the final paper.

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Correspondence to Kristian S. Nielsen.

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Nielsen, K.S., Cologna, V., Bauer, J.M. et al. Realizing the full potential of behavioural science for climate change mitigation. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 322–330 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01951-1

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