The Psychological Foundations of Climate Solutions : From Individual Minds to Collective Climate Action

For students, researchers, and policymakers seeking informed insights into what drives climate action. Bringing together leading behavioral scientists, it explains how emotions, identity, and decision-making shape support for climate solutions and advance effective, equitable policy. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Why do people support or resist climate solutions? And what actually moves societies from concern to action? This book brings together leading scholars in psychology to answer these urgent questions. Spanning cognition, emotion, values, misinformation, social norms, identity, culture, decision-making, and collective action, it offers the most comprehensive synthesis to date of the psychological forces shaping climate outcomes. Moving beyond abstract debates, the volume focuses explicitly on solutions: how to increase public support for effective policy, counter polarization and conspiracy beliefs, leverage social norms, mobilize social movements, and design interventions that bridge individual behaviors and systemic change. Each chapter combines rigorous scientific evidence with clear implications for practice, culminating in a policy-oriented summary for practitioners. Accessible yet authoritative, this work is an essential resource for anyone seeking a science-based roadmap to advancing effective and equitable climate action. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.