Psychology can play a role in helping fight climate change by gleaning the most                                 effective ways to change human behavior and encouraging individuals to take action

Behavior change is particularly relevant to environmental challenges and is a topic that has been studied extensively across disciplines. Theoretical models of human behavior, especially as it relates to consumption, are important for conceptualizing behavior while also signaling how behavior can be changed. These models help us understand how social and psychological influences affect behavior, which can further aid in identifying effective intervention strategies. 

INTRODUCTION 

Changing behavior to solve environmental challenges is not in and of itself a new idea. Indeed, if most environmental problems are rooted in human behavior, then most any tool we have deployed to solve them is fundamentally a behavior change tool. The fact is simply that the most common approaches thus far applied to addressing climate change and any number of other challenges have depended on a fairly narrow set of tools that can be summarized largely by the following: 

• Providing information to improve knowledge-based decision-making; 

• Setting rules and regulations (or what is commonly known as command-and-control) to set limits on what is allowed and what is not; and 

• Introducing economic or market incentives (e.g., subsidies, payments, rewards) or disincentives (e.g., taxes, fines). 

Climate change is a thoroughly imposing challenge to address by changing human behavior. Each of the above tools has a key contribution to make. But we know that facts do not necessarily change minds, that people do not necessarily follow rules just because they exist (especially when enforcement is problematic), and that people are not always perfect economic “maximizers.” To make things more complicated, behaviors that perpetuate global warming are arguably much more difficult to change than those such as smoking or seatbelt usage, in part because the benefits of shifting those behaviors usually accrue more quickly and directly to the individual. The climate benefits of changing behaviors are often delayed, mostly invisible, and require collective action to bring about. Yet there are many benefits that do accrue to individuals for shifted behaviors, such as physical health benefits from changing diets or yield benefits for farmers who shift cultivation practices. Highlighting how behavioral insights can change behaviors that have immediate benefits for individuals and groups as well as larger benefits for cities, countries, and the global climate is critically important given the need for rapid action to reduce emissions and slow global warming. To achieve full-scale adoption of the 30 behavioral solutions to climate change mitigation we have outlined above (in addition to the many others needed to achieve 2050 targets), we will need to draw as much as possible on the science of human behavior and the behavior change tools available to us. The good news is that these tools exist, and solutions around the world are already beginning to deploy them. We have identified three additional “levers” to influence behavior that the social and behavioral sciences tell us are particularly promising to inspire and enable behavior change for climate change: emotional appeals, social incentives, and choice architecture.