Emotional Pathways to Climate Action
Emotionality is a critical element facilitating climate adaptation, mitigation and disaster recovery. For climate response strategies to be effective, they need to accommodate the complexity and relevance of emotionality, without which behaviour incentives will continue to have limited and unpredictable effect, and the emotional needs of disaster survivors, which are central to recovery, will be overlooked.
In this project, supported by an Insight Grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities research Council, and the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Alberta, we ask the following research questions: 1. How do personal and intersectional attributes shape emotion-cognition pathways to climate change (in)action? 2. Which emotional pathways support inaction, and which support action? 3. How does direct experience with disaster shape these emotional response pathways?
Our key aim is to generate and share knowledge that can lead directly to climate action: personal and collective efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Our core interdisciplinary team of lead investigators includes a behavioural economist, Dr. Maik Kecinski of the University of Delaware; a psychologist, Dr. Kyle Nash of the University of Alberta, and me, an environmental sociologist. By bringing these three different approaches to human and collective behaviour together in one project, we are in a much better position to generate ground-breaking advances in our understanding of social responses to the climate emergency.
Our project involves three components. First, beginning in the Fall of 2023, we launched a survey of 4,0000 North Americans, working with Prolific, a firm that assists researchers with identifying survey participants. Our survey includes an integrative combination of personality, attitudinal, and emotional items with experimental games, in order to identify the distinct qualities of respondents according to their primary behavioural approach to the climate emergency: denial, apathy, withdrawal, inert, and action.
Because surveys can never provide us with the richness of one-on-one, semi-structured interviews, over the winter months of 2024 we are also inviting 100 survey respondents to participate in a follow-up interview. Conducted virtually. We have been oversampling nonwhite and low-income survey respondents in our follow-up interview sample, as these important groups are so often inadequately represented in human behaviour research.
Our third component involves a case study in a small Canadian community that has recently experienced extreme weather events which have been partly attributed to climate change. While surveys can introduce hypothetical prompts to elicit emotional responses, this third component allows us to observe emotional responses to real events. Adding this third component also captures a crucially important element of our climate emotionality landscape: coping with disaster. How will we, as a society, manage to endure the expected increase in frequency and intensity of extreme events, while simultaneously investing our collective energies in addressing the climate emergency? Interviews were completed in the Summer of 2023, and we are now busy analyzing the results.