Addressing climate change with behavioral science: A global intervention tournament in 63 countries

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj5778

"Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change.
However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to
change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11
expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs,
policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting
behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the
interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics,
and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing
psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a
future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion
induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful
behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of
each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These
findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies
across audiences and target behaviors."

Via Future Crunch, who wrote: “Climate change is not going to be solved by
making people [change] their habits; it will be solved by deploying technology
and policy.”

Cheers,
       *** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net               Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/                 Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/            Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/               Manager, Serious Cybernetics