Caring About One’s Legacy Relates to Constructive Coping with Climate Change

Abstract

Climate change is an existential threat facing humankind, and one that we must productively cope with as its most severe consequences come to pass. In the present investigation we theorize that one way that people may cope with an existential threat is through personal legacy-building efforts. In three correlational studies (N = 855) including samples from the U.S. and Global South, we found that people construe their proenvironmental behaviors as legacy-building activities, and that doing so relates to the perceived effectiveness of a behavior, as well as the reported frequency of engaging in a behavior. Further, we found that people who were motivated to leave a legacy grounded in the desire to have a positive impact on others also tended to be more concerned about climate change, but not paralyzed by such concern, indicated by a negative or non-significant correlation with climate change anxiety, a positive correlation with constructive hope and active coping, and negative correlations with hope based in denial and avoidant coping.