Addressing the climate crisis: An action plan for psychologists (summary).

Abstract

Psychologists have conducted valuable work on the climate crisis and can make even greater contributions to understanding the crisis, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and achieving climate justice. This summary of the report from the American Psychological Association’s (APA’s) Task Force on Climate Change examines the multiple roles psychologists play in research, practice, education, advocacy, and communications related to the climate crisis and how APA can facilitate expansion of psychologists’ work in these domains. The task force recommends that APA pursue a set of activities that will both (a) strengthen the field by encouraging a larger number of psychologists, across all specializations, to work on climate change and (b) broaden the impact of psychologists’ work on climate change by supporting their engagement and collaborations with other fields and sectors. Further, the task force offers recommendations for how APA can help mitigate climate change by improving its own energy use and sustainability practices and encouraging improvements by other organizations and the public.

How Can Psychology Contribute to Climate Change Governance? A Systematic Review

“…Our work aligns with the call to 'Enlarge the range of settings and partnerships in which psychology practitioners address climate change' [11] (p. 7), a challenge based on a governance frame, since it asks psychologists to proceed beyond the study of individual factors influencing behaviours, and to embrace multilevel, multisectoral and multidisciplinary perspectives to foster climate resilience and advancing transformative change, and thus to develop the capacity to dialogue with policymakers, citizens, scholars and experts from different scientific fields.…”

“…Given the widely documented impacts of climate change on individuals and communities and the urgency to carry out a thorough social transformation [1,3], as well as the call for interdisciplinarity in the production of climate knowledge [10], psychology could play a vital role in the interdisciplinary and intersectoral endeavour to address such challenges [11].…”

“…In this regard, some entry points for psychology are suggested by a recent report of the American Psychological Association (APA) aiming at tracing wider scopes of research and action for psychological practitioners in addressing the climate crisis [11]. In particular, the paper refers to the policy realm and to the engagement with both institutions and civil society groups as a privileged area for psychologists to bring their expertise, fostering citizen's active involvement and facilitating processes of deliberation among stakeholders, beyond choice architecture [11,73]. Supporting climate policymaking and planning in collaboration with institutional bodies, stakeholders and citizens has been identified as a desired psychologists' task [11,55,74], while at the same time, reporting a lack of research in this domain [55].…”