Climate Change: Psychological Solutions and Strategies for Change

Abstract

Climate change is typically viewed as an ''environmental'' problem rather than the psychological issue that it represents. Given that barriers to proenvironmental behavior are rooted in psychological processes, solution approaches to combating climate change must incorporate significant psychological adaptations. Reframing climate change as a public health problem, highlighting success stories and health benefits, focusing on the here and now, providing specific direction for behavior change, and acknowledging moral, ethical, religious, and altruistic imperatives are all important components of successfully addressing the wicked problem of climate change.

Science synthesis to support socioecological resilience in the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascade Range

“…Addressing these diverse viewpoints and values is essential to bridging perceptual divides and increasing understanding of climate change impacts, and generating support for the actions needed for mitigation and adaptation (Nisbet 2009). Koger et al (2011) suggested that framing climate change as a global environmental issue may make it distant or too removed from personal responsibility, thus inhibiting actions to mitigate impacts. They suggested reframing climate change to focus on the immediacy and local nature of issues and impacts, and emphasizing behavioral control and actions that are problem focused.…”

Coping with Climate Change among Adolescents: Implications for Subjective Well-Being and Environmental Engagement

“…Researchers have recently begun arguing that global climate change is not only an environmental problem but also a socio-psychological problem, both in the sense that the western world's life-style to a large extent contributes to climate change and that the complexity and seriousness of this problem could turn it into a psychological stressor [1][2][3]. How people psychologically cope with climate change could be related both to environmental engagement and well-being [2,[4][5][6][7].…”

Motivating Project Owners to Increase Their Commitment towards Improving the Delivery Performance of Green Building Projects

“…The prevailing theoretical position about the complementarity of INT and EXT in the body of knowledge is that the former undermines the latter (Koger, 2011;Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999;Gagné & Deci, 2005). This study however supports the less prevailing argument based on the conditions for the complementarity of INT and EXT (Amabile (1993), all of which are applicable in the green building context 1.…”

“…This suggests that while one is in effect, say internal motivation, the other is also in effect. Theoretically, this refutes the prevailing theoretical position in the field of psychology that external motivation undermines the internal motivation of an individual to perform an action (Deci, et al, 1999;Koger, Leslie, & Hayes, 2011). Instead, the less prevailing but conditional complementarity of internal and external motivation is supported (Amabile, 1993).…”