Tie climate action to protecting a way of life to increase motivation, study says

People need to feel that climate change is affecting them now or that taking action is a patriotic act for their country to overcome apathy towards environmental efforts, a new global study has found.

In a paper published in Communications Psychology today, a global team of researchers led by the University of Birmingham have found that motivational interventions to successfully make climate action more important to people include showing how climate change is happening now and affecting them or others like them.

The research team worked with participants from six countries around the world: the UK, USA, Bulgaria, Greece, Sweden and Nigeria. People who didn’t experience one of the interventions were less motivated to exert physical effort to help climate causes than for when effort helped tackle starvation. However, some interventions presented before measuring motivation removed this bias, increasing relative motivation to benefit the environment.

The most effective idea presented to participants was to address psychological distance – the feeling that climate change doesn’t personally affect them or those around them. This intervention presented information about how climate change affected them locally for instance.  The second uses the psychology of system justification – the idea that the current system of living and doing things is the right one. This intervention showed how climate change threatened participants’ way of life, for example floods in the UK destroying Britons’ homes, and presented climate action as a patriotic act to prevent this.

Dr Jo Cutler from the University of Birmingham and a lead author of the paper said: “From cycling rather than driving to organising waste for recycling, many of the actions we can take to tackle climate change require us to exert physical effort. This global study found that participants around the world can be responsive to interventions that encourage climate action. We found that the most effective interventions were those that show climate change is already affecting people and their way of life may be changed or lost due to climate change. Interventions using this information led to participants being as willing to put in effort as for a more universally recognised cause like ending world hunger.”

“Lots of previous research on climate change simply asks people about their attitudes or behaviours they plan to do but there is no incentive for them to be honest. In our experiment, if people want to help, they have to work hard for it. We hope this approach will become more common in future work.”

Participants taking part in the study were asked a series of screening questions to assess their beliefs and attitudes about climate change, before taking part in tests to assess their willingness to act.

Participants were asked to make a physical effort to raise money for a climate-based charity, or a charity seeking to end world hunger. Prior to engaging in the physical effort, participants received one from a range of 11 different interventions (or none). The most successful interventions were::

• System justification: Text and images framed climate change as a threat to participants’ way of life and encouraged pro-environmental behaviour as patriotic; and
• Decreasing psychological distance. Climate change was presented as an immediate, local threat, and participants reflected on how it affects them personally.

Interventions that were less successful in overcoming bias include:

• Scientific consensus: Participants saw a message and graphic emphasising that 99% of climate scientists agree climate change is real and caused by humans; and
• Letter to future generations. Participants wrote a letter to a future child or other family member, describing their efforts to protect the planet and how they wish to be remembered.

The research team also found individual predictors of effort to help the environment included their personal belief that climate change is real and support for pro-environmental policies.

Professor Patricia Lockwood from the University of Birmingham and a senior author of the paper said: “As the world prepares to gather for COP30 in Brazil this year, individual and collective citizen action is an essential step towards making a meaningful difference to prevent climate change that affects every part of the world.

“Our findings show that despite how powerful some interventions might feel to sway us on climate action, when it comes to prosocial behaviour we as humans are by and large motivated by what feels immediate and close to us.

“Making climate action a patriotic duty for every citizen in every country around the world is a tool that we can adopt now to try to limit human-caused climate change.”

The study’s authors note that the paper doesn’t look at the difference in interventions between participants from different countries, due to the numbers of people taking part.

The University of Birmingham is leading research to help mitigate and adapt to the risks and impacts associated with climate change. The University has been awarded UNFCCC Observer Status which means that its experts can contribute to the vital discussions taking place at COP30.

Research at Birmingham, including at the Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action addresses the reality of climate change through transforming health, environment, and society – sustainably supporting people and planet. Its researchers work with industry, academic and policy partners to accelerate progress on UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) towards the 2030 Agenda.