Emotions and sustainability — Sage Perspectives Blog

Disa Sauter and Tobias Brosch

The climate crisis is intensely emotional: many of us feel anxious about the future and frustrated at the lack of adequate political action. At the same time, we may be hopeful that we can avert the worst of the projected outcomes and maybe even feel excited at the prospect of building a better world. Yet despite the clear links between emotions and sustainability, scientific knowledge is lacking on how emotions shape and are shaped by the climate and biodiversity crises, and how our emotions relate to pro-environmental behaviour.

In order to stimulate more work in this area, we asked leading sustainability scholars and policy makers to share their thoughts on how they believe an understanding of emotion can help support a sustainable societal transition. The result is a collection of 11 articles that offer a wide range of perspectives, incorporating insights from psychology, ecology, communication science, policy and environmental systems analysis.

A key message is that we need to gain a better understanding of the deep anxiety elicited by the climate and biodiversity crises. On the one hand, the distress elicited by the climate crisis needs to be normalised as a reasonable reaction to an existential threat. At the same time, new strategies are needed to help people cope with climate anxiety to avoid them becoming overwhelmed.

The collection of papers also offers several case studies of emotional experiences relating to local instances of climate change adaptation and mitigation. This work highlights the need for studying the emotions of people in different geographic regions and cultural contexts, both as individuals and communities. It is particularly important to consider the emotions of people in the Global South, who are in many ways most vulnerable to the near-term impact of the climate and ecological crises.

Another set of papers focuses on how we can leverage emotions and affective science research to promote sustainable action. Here positive emotions can play an especially important role, because – thankfully – it sometimes feels good to do the right thing. When that happens, it can result in positive reinforcing feedback loops between expectations and experiences of positive emotions relating to pro-environmental behaviours. Also, shared positive feelings have great potential for helping to solve environmental problems, because emotions can be contagious and thereby help spread sustainable behaviours, and even shift norms. However, much more research is needed to map out the causal pathways from emotions to climate action. We also need more longitudinal studies to examine whether behavioural changes can be made to last.

Finally, there is a need for affective scientists to be involved in sustainability policy making. It is abundantly clear what needs to happen to avoid the worst scenarios: global greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced quickly and drastically. Yet although accomplishing this goal is arguably the most important challenge of our times, the strategies that have been tried so far have not been very successful, with emissions continuing to increase year by year. Considering emotions may help improve our chance to transition to a sustainable, just society.

Clearly, there is a wealth of impactful topics on which more research and theorising is needed to understand how emotions and sustainability interact. We hope that this collection of articles will put sustainability on the agenda and stimulate more research in affective sustainability science.

READ THE COLLECTION

Read more about Emotions and Sustainability

About the Authors

Featured

Disa Sauter is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her work examines emotion with a focus on theory and functions, and she has a particular interest in positive emotions and distinctions between different positive affective states. Her research is funded by a an ERC Starting grant and a Vici grant from the Dutch Science Foundation, and she acts as associate editor at Emotion Review and consulting editor at Psychological Review.

Featured

Tobias Brosch is Associate Professor at the University of Geneva, where he holds the chair for Psychology of Sustainable Development. In his research, Tobias is interested in understanding how cognitive, affective, and social processes influence our environmentally relevant choices, and how this knowledge can be used to promote sustainable decisions and behaviors. His research has been published in more than 80 peer-reviewed articles in journals including PNAS, Nature Energy, and Nature Human Behavior. Tobias is associate editor for the journal Cognition and Emotion and member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Tobias moreover actively engages with policy makers in the sustainability domain to bring insights from behavioral science into their work and to promote science-policy collaborations. He regularly consults for institutions such as the World Economic Forum, the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, or the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. He has recently been appointed representative of the American Psychological Association (APA), the European Federation of Psychologists' Associations (EFPA), and the Swiss Federation of Psychologists (SFP) to the United Nations.