Realizing the full potential of behavioural science for climate change mitigation


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

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  • Received: 05 July 2022

  • Accepted: 06 February 2024

  • Published: 15 March 2024

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01951-1


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