Psychologists and Climate Change: What Vision Should Guide Us, and How and With Whom Do We Get There?

Abstract

Climate change is an existential risk for humankind. Environmental psychologists concerned about climate change have so far focused mainly on understanding and promoting environmentally friendly behavior of individuals. This results in knowledge about easy-to-research but low-impact behaviors and falls short of the impact that psychology could have on broader societal transformation. To develop this impact, we focused on answers psychology might offer to questions raised by transformation studies, which explore how innovations in niches change the incumbent, dominant system. With respect to climate change, what does psychology have to say about how we can transform a system that exploits and degrades the environment and puts human survival at risk? The first step to answering this question is articulating a vision, the goal towards which we should be heading.