The case for impact-focused environmental psychology

By K. Nielsen, V. Cologna, F. Lange, C. Brick, P. Stern. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2021

129 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human activities are causing climate change and severely degrading ecosystems resulting in biodiversity loss unprecedented for millions of years (IPBES, 2019; IPCC, 2018). Mitigating these problems largely hinges on changing human behavior. Although a major stream of environmental psychology is interested in changing behavior to address environmental degradation, psychologists have not had much impact on global initiatives to mitigate biodiversity loss or climate change. This is exemplified by psychologists' growing but still limited representation in major research collaborations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). We argue that psychologists can increase their contribution to mitigating environmental degradation if they focus primarily on environmental impact and secondarily on psychological theory when setting research priorities.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c38ccc1f32e49160a3c89b353cdab66d01832cf