Climate change and human behaviour

Climate change is an immense challenge. Human behaviour is crucial in climate change mitigation, and in tackling the arising consequences. In this joint Focus issue between Nature Climate Change and Nature Human Behaviour, we take a closer look at the role of human behaviour in the climate crisis.

Behaviour change is essential for effective solutions to climate threats. Thus, policy-relevant behavioural science studies are needed for a shift towards human-centred climate actions.

For effective climate policy, we need both classic and behavioural policies. Green nudges facilitate the effectiveness of a carbon tax by increasing the salience of the tax, harnessing pro-climate concerns, extending the reach of a tax by targeting behaviours directly and, importantly, increasing public acceptance of carbon taxes.

Applying behavioural science can support system-level change for climate protection. Behavioural scientists should provide reliable large-scale data that help in understanding public perceptions and behaviours. Governments should secure infrastructure for data collection and the implementation of evidence.

Time is short to secure a liveable and sustainable future; yet, inaction from governments, industry and civil society is setting the course for 3.2 °C of warming, with all the cascading and catastrophic consequences that this implies. In this context, when does civil disobedience by scientists become justified?

Communities want to determine their own climate change adaptation strategies, and scientists and decision-makers should listen to them — both the equity and efficacy of climate change adaptation depend on it. We outline key lessons researchers and development actors can take to support communities and learn from them.

Decarbonizing global steel production requires a fundamental transformation. A sectoral climate club, which goes beyond tariffs and involves deep transnational cooperation, can facilitate this transformation by addressing technical, economic and political uncertainties.

Many natural disaster insurance markets were designed under historical distributions of climate risk that differ from those prevailing today. These differences create challenges for natural disaster insurance markets to mitigate the effects of climate change and also increase demand for innovative policy solutions.

As regulatory attention on scope 3 emissions mounts, the ‘double-counting’ concern cited by companies can be addressed by allocating shared responsibility across the supply chain. Measurement and data collection present more substantial challenges in reaching an effective allocation.

Licypriya Kangujam is a 10-year-old climate change activist from India. She also founded the Child Movement to raise the voices of the children of the world in the fight against climate change. In conversation with Nature Human Behaviour, she talks in her own words about her motivation to become an activist and her wishes for the future.

Many academic researchers wish to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation in relevant ways, but do not know how. Wolfgang Knorr, cofounder of ‘Faculty for a Future’, talks to Nature Human Behaviour about how academic researchers can create meaningful impact and can help to address the climate crisis

Hornsey and Lewandowsky examine psychological and structural reasons for climate change scepticism and describe strategies for reducing the destructive influence of such scepticism.

Human cooperation, which is essential for climate action, is shaped by the social cognition of individuals. This Review examines three mechanisms that play an important role in discouraging pro-environmental behaviours, but which can also provide effective solutions for collective action.

This Review by Neil Adger and colleagues examines the multiple dimensions of human well-being that are affected by climate change. The authors propose policy and research priorities that are oriented towards supporting well-being.

Fiona Charlson and colleagues review direct and indirect ways in which climate change impacts mental health. The authors provide an overview of the current evidence to inform the mental health field’s response to climate change and identify promising approaches for health professionals for individual-level, community-level and system-wide responses, as well as advocacy and education.

When and why are interventions to encourage pro-environmental behaviour effective? van Valkengoed and colleagues introduce a classification system that links different interventions to the determinants of environmental behaviour. On the basis of this classification system, they provide guidelines for practitioners on how to select interventions that are most likely to change the key determinants of a specific target behaviour.

Carbon labelling may affect changes in both organizational and retail consumer behaviour. This Review examines the effectiveness of label programmes on the behaviour of actors throughout product supply chains, discussing current challenges, future pathways and implications for label design.

For a long time, climate models did not account for human behaviour. This Review by Beckage et al. surveys existing social climate models, an emerging class of models that embed human behaviour in climate models, and makes recommendations for how to best represent and integrate human behaviour in climate models.

Exposure to extreme weather events could increase environmental concerns and support for Green parties. With high-resolution data across European countries, the authors demonstrate the existence of such effect, then further discuss the heterogeneity and possible mechanisms.

A new study finds that Americans underestimate how many are concerned about climate change as well as support for major climate policies by nearly half, with climate policy supporters significantly outnumbering non-supporters.

Education increases political polarization on climate change beliefs in the US. Here the authors find that this effect does not generalize to other contexts. Across 64 countries, education has positive effects on climate change beliefs, and interactions with ideology are more nuanced and contextual.

Climate change communication is more likely to persuade when the message and the messenger resonate with the audience’s values and identities. A campaign field experiment testing online messages tailored to US Republicans increased their climate change beliefs, risk perceptions and issue importance.

Sand has become an increasingly scarce critical resource. As a result of changing climate, Greenland now receives large deposits of glacially derived sand along its coasts. Local communities broadly support domestic, environmentally mindful economic sand extraction.

Climate actors such as cities, regions, countries and companies show diversity in climate actions with gaps in adaptation and consumption-supply chain emissions reductions, suggests a machine-learning based natural language processing and social network analysis.

Communication is an important tool in combating climate change and building support for new energy policy. Here Gustafson et al. measure the longitudinal effect of three message frames around the benefits of renewable energy on Democrat and Republican beliefs and support for such technology in the United States.

Berger et al. investigate green defaults under varying prices. Using field data from a flight compensation platform, they show that green defaults are effective. Their effectiveness, however, vanishes when costs become too high.

Behavioural interventions can reduce energy consumption and hence carbon emissions among households. Khanna et al. compare the effectiveness of different types of monetary and non-monetary household interventions using a machine learning-assisted meta-analysis, and examine the situations where each is most useful.

Introducing carbon prices is considered central to climate change mitigation. This study shows that publics prefer constant carbon cost schedules rather than those that gradually increase, even when average costs are the same, because of a desire to smooth consumption over time.

Insurance for a group that reduces risks with informal within-group transfers and local peer monitoring can help low-income farmers alleviate poverty aggravated by extreme weather.

Observed daily changes in CO₂ emissions from across the globe reveal the sectors and countries where pandemic-related emissions declines were most pronounced in 2020.

The extent to which policy-induced changes in food demand patterns help address environmental and health challenges remains poorly understood. Using a survey-based, randomized controlled experiment with almost 6,000 respondents from the United Kingdom, this study assesses the impacts on food purchases, greenhouse gas emissions and dietary health of applying carbon and/or health taxes, information provision and a combination of both tax and information strategies.

Dietary changes are needed for greater nutrition and sustainability, yet it remains unclear how drastic these changes must be. Combining a new epidemiology-based nutritional index and 18 environmental indicators, this study estimates the positive impact of specific food substitutions.

Policy packages for reducing the environmental impact of food systems were tested for acceptability through conjoint experiments in China, Germany and the United States. Achieving a sustainable food system may involve unpopular measures, but strategic policy bundling may increase citizen support for these measures.

Social learning processes regarding eco-conscious dietary choices can substantially alter projections of global peak land use for agriculture, according to a coupled social-and-land use dynamics model

An often-overlooked aspect of vehicle electrification is how often and why owners give up on electric vehicles. Using surveys of California electric vehicle owners, Hardman and Tal find discontinuance rates of 20% and 18% among plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicle owners, and examine the motivations behind discontinuance.

The environmental effectiveness of procurement incentives for electric vehicle (EV) sales depends on the behaviour of EV adopters. This study explores such a relationship and how procurement policies should be designed in order to achieve emissions reduction and be economically efficient.

Combining standardized achievement data for 58 countries and 12,000 US school districts with detailed weather and academic calendar information, Park et al. show that the rate of learning decreases as the number of hot school days goes up.

Burke et al. show that smoke exposure is associated with behavioural changes and worsening sentiment, with important differences by income. They document substantial infiltration of smoke into homes, suggesting that current policy reliance on self-protection could be ineffective.

Bayesian spatio-temporal modeling of mortality from injuries in the contiguous USA shows increases in the number of deaths attributable to abnormal temperature fluctuations due to global heating.

Using detailed data on credit and debit card transactions, Lai et al. show an inverted U-shaped relationship between temperature and consumption in the short run. Adaptation moderates the relationship in the long run.

Imagery of wildfire destruction elicits more negative emotions and – among those most at risk from wildfire – reduces risk information seeking behavior, according to online and field experiments with homeowners in the western USA.

Extreme wildfire events are on the increase, particularly in anthropogenic, suburban landscapes. Particular areas of concern are the subtropical Southern Hemisphere and European Mediterranean Basin.

An ecological analysis of 326 cities in 9 countries across Latin America found that changes in ambient temperature have a substantial contribution to all-cause mortality, with small increases in extreme heat associated with steep increases in mortality risk.

Using machine learning, the authors reveal that stable background conditions explain most variation in armed conflict risk worldwide. Positive temperature deviations and precipitation extremes also increase the risk of conflict onset and incidence.

Climate has affected organized armed conflict within countries, and intensifying climate change is estimated to increase future risks of conflict, although other drivers are substantially more influential and the mechanisms of climate–conflict linkages remain uncertain.

This study finds that foreign firms tend to shy away from countries with higher physical climate risks than do local firms. Chinese FDI is significantly more exposed to most physical climate risks than non-Chinese FDI across countries.

Multi-proxy palaeoecological methods reconstruct phases of land clearance, maize cultivation and forest regrowth in the High Andes centuries before European incursion, and do not support the idea that forest regrowth and peak carbon sequestration were coincident with European arrival.