All Hearts and Minds on Deck: Hope Motivates Climate Action by Linking the Present and the Future

Humanity is exceeding planetary boundaries as income, wealth, and other disparities increase both within and across countries (Steffen et al., 2015). Technological and policy solutions to these challenges exist, and the costs of decisive remedial action are lower than the future catastrophic consequences of inaction, and are increasingly a sound economic proposition for those alive today (IPCC, 2022; Jenkins et al., 2021). However, despite strong economic and moral arguments for rapid action on climate change, governments, corporations, and civil society have made only limited progress toward sustainability goals—far short of what is required to keep climate change at tolerable levels.

One important impediment to greater progress is the widespread implicit assumption in policy circles that relevant decisions by key stakeholders (and the public) are arrived at by rational deliberation. More recently, scholars and practitioners have complemented or replaced rational accounts of action or inaction on climate change with cognitive, social, political, and structural ones (Constantino et al., 2022; Keohane, 2015; Weber, 2016). Yet, emotions have received relatively limited attention, despite a growing acknowledgment of climate anxiety and other affective responses to climate change (Clayton, 2018), and a long history of research demonstrating the importance of emotions in guiding decision-making (James, 1890), political behavior and collective and personal action on climate change (Feldman & Hart, 2015; Marcus, 2000; Smith & Leiserowitz, 2014).

Sustainable use of our planet's finite resources calls for “all hands on deck,” and all hearts and minds as well. In particular, responding to a slowly increasing threat like climate change requires a sustained focus on the future over a very long time-horizon. It also requires the belief that there is a future worth preserving and that change for the better is possible despite growing evidence of the adverse impacts of climate change—all features that may be embodied in the feeling of hope. In this review, we thus focus on hope—a construct that has both cognitive and emotional elements and is temporally expansive, potentially creating a visceral link between present states and actions and future outcomes. Additionally, although hope is a positive emotion, it is often a response to threatening situations where a desirable future outcome is deemed possible (Feldman & Hart, 2015; Lazarus, 1991)—as such, it may bolster positive narratives of change and hold space in the present for a future that is worth striving for.

Emotions in Climate Change Assessments

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988. It was not until 2014 that the IPCC acknowledged psychologically-informed decision processes for the first time in its Fifth Assessment Report in a chapter on Risk Management (Kunreuther et al., 2014). Eight years later, in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, a new chapter on Behavior and Demand Side Solutions for Mitigation (Creutzig et al., 2022) highlights the importance of considering empirically and psychologically informed choice models, as well as social identities and social networks when designing climate solutions.

However, the role of emotions in decision-making is rarely acknowledged in the 2022 IPCC reports. In the report on Adaptation in Working Group II, emotion is included as a ramification of climate change, with a focus on “emotional distress/harm/cost,” or as “emotional attachments,” such as to one's place of residence. In the report on Mitigation by Working Group III there are even fewer references to emotion, with the instances that exist focusing mostly on “emotional responses” in chapters on Energy Systems, Transport, and Investment and Finance. The Behavior and Demand Side Solutions chapter elaborates on emotions only three times (Ch.5; Creutzig et al., 2022, pp. 5–68). The first mention is in the description of the different decision modes individuals use to arrive at choices (see Reeck et al., 2022): “As individuals pursue a broad set of goals and use calculation-, emotion-, and rule-based processes when they make energy decisions, demand-side policies can use a broad range of behavioral tools that complement subsidies, taxes, and regulations.” The second mention refers to the activation of emotions as one mechanism by which narratives (rather than statistical information) can motivate action (see Constantino & Weber, 2021): “Narratives about climate mitigation … can capture people's attention and evoke emotional and behavioral responses.” The third and final mention refers to the power of psychological risk dimensions (Fischhoff et al., 1978), and in particular the emotion of dread, to overcome psychological distance and motivate action: “When climate change is seen as distant, it is not feared. In contrast, nuclear power and its accident potential score high on psychological dread. Germany post Fukushima was affected by emotional factors.”

Extensive past research has shown that emotions are fundamental determinants of judgment and decision-making, including climate change perception and action (Brosch, 2021). Conceiving risks as “feelings” that people experience rather than as statistics they calculate (Loewenstein et al., 2001) better predicts their risk perceptions (Holtgrave & Weber, 1993) and financial actions (Weber et al., 2013). The decisions-from-experience framework (Hertwig et al., 2004) similarly demonstrates that the emotional impact of experiencing adverse consequences of low-probability events predicts subsequent choices better than objective event probabilities. Query theory—a description of the processes by which individuals make decisions—assumes that individuals recall both emotional and cognitive associations between choice options and past experiences when deciding what to choose (Weber & Johnson, 2009).

A large US panel study shows that emotion-laden experience with the adverse consequences of either the coronavirus pandemic or climate change (i.e., in the form of extreme weather) reduces political polarization in worry about either hazard (Constantino et al., 2022). While emotions like anger can increase polarization (Webster et al., 2021), emotions such as worry and hope can increase perceptions of efficacy and motivate climate action across political groups (Constantino et al., 2022; Feldman & Hart, 2015). Furthermore, continuous actions over time (rather than single responses to acute threats) are better motivated by positive than negative emotions (Schneider et al., 2021; Weber, 2006).

Hope as Motivator of Climate Action

The ecologist Amory Lovins advocates for the practice of “applied hope” to achieve sustainability: “believing that our world and the causes one cares about can get better, and working to make them so” (Lovins, 2018)—important characteristics of individual and collective climate action. Applied hope is described by Lovins to be a “deliberate choice of heart and head”. Hope likely has both a cognitive component (e.g., the belief that things can and will get better) and an emotional component that contemplates the future in a positive and agentic way. Such a multifaceted state of hope may be an important motivator of climate action and intergenerational cooperation, as suggested by Bosetti et al. (2022). In an intergenerational public-goods game that pitted an attentional foci on the past vs. the future, individual contributions to a public good were doubled by the experimenter and distributed to a future generation, making contributions individually costly but socially optimal. Respondents tasked with predicting future respondents’ contributions to the public good before making their own decision to contribute (vs. doing so afterward) were significantly more likely to contribute a portion of their endowment to the next generation, especially when their predecessors had not contributed to their endowment. Considering the future, and expecting a positive outcome, can set people on a new path and overcome the legacy of insufficient public goods provision. Research directly focused on hope has found that it is an important precursor of climate policy support (Feldman & Hart, 2018) and pro-environmental behaviors (Maartensson & Loi, 2022; Smith & Leiserowitz, 2014).

Different definitions of hope have been proposed and tested in the literature. Snyder (2000) introduced a cognitive and instrumental definition of hope as the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, which is supported by a study showing that perceived competency can lead to feelings of hope (Li & Monroe, 2019). Lazarus (1991) instead defined hope as a discrete emotion that is aroused in contexts of threat where there is a belief that the situation can improve. An analysis of free-form definitions of hope provided by Dutch respondents provides further evidence for its future-oriented cognitive and emotional focus (Van Zomeren et al., 2019).

Ojala (2023) embraces the multifaceted definition of hope and argues that this complexity (and the various ways in which hope has been defined, measured, and manipulated across studies) explains the inconsistent relationship between hope and climate action in the literature. For example, Kerret et al. (2020) find that a hope-enhancing school program, that attempts to increase cognitive and emotional components of hope in an experiential intervention over an extended period of time, increases pro-environmental behavior in Israeli students in Grades 5 and 6. In contrast, Chadwick (2015) found that simple, one-off communications designed to appeal to cognitive components of hope did not increase intended climate action among US college students. Van Zomeren et al. (2019) find that simple messages communicating the possibilities of solutions to climate change increase emotion-based coping, but not collective climate action intentions. The emotional component of hope that is transmitted by positive personal experience with change seems to be effective in triggering action. In related work, Hart and Feldman (2015) find that political efficacy messages increase the sense of hope and political participation among US residents, and that news images and text that focus on climate-oriented actions increase hope and support for climate policies across the ideological spectrum (Feldman & Hart, 2018).

Suggestive Evidence on the Antecedents and Consequences of Hope

Drawing on survey data from a single wave of a large, nationally representative panel study of American respondents (n = 4,337; collected between 04/2022 and 08/2022), Constantino and Weber (2023) use an elastic net regression to identify the most important positive and negative predictors of hope, climate action, and support for government regulation of carbon emissions from among many potential predictors. Their survey includes modules on climate change, extreme weather, COVID-19, policy preferences, politics and civic engagement, general values, and social preferences (see Constantino et al., 2022), as well as a question about hope: “Looking into the future, over the next five years, do you think your quality of life and that of your family will … get significantly better, get somewhat better, stay the same, get somewhat worse, get significantly worse?”. This question captures Amory Lovins’ definition of hope as the belief and sentiment that the world can and will get better.

Constantino and Weber (2023) find that holding hope for the future was predicted by a mix of cognitive, emotional, demographic, and environmental or contextual variables. The psychological risk dimension of climate-change dread (“Is the risk of global warming/climate change a risk that people have learned to live with and can think about reasonably calmly, or is it one that people have great dread for-on the level of a gut reaction?;” Fischhoff et al., 1978) and worry about the economy were both strong negative predictors of hope, while five variables measuring trust in different actors were important positive contributors to feelings of hope. Interestingly, some worry variables correlated positively with hope, suggesting that a positive vision of the future can be held alongside concern about the present. Younger, richer, more urban, religious, and Republican respondents tended to be more hopeful.

Looking at the mean value of hope in the future across survey waves, Constantino and Weber (2023) also found that hope was not fixed but varied overtime, In particular, while hope about the future was lower among those with greater climate-change-related dread (which was also correlated with a liberal ideology) in the first three waves of the survey, the period that President Trump was in office, it increased for those respondents in waves 4 and 5, which coincide with the Federal election and President Biden's inauguration. At the same time, the opposite pattern was observed for those lowest in climate dread, who were also more likely to be conservative: Hope decreased in the two waves following the election of President Biden. These results suggest that hope has both individual and situational determinants.

Ultimately, to address climate change and other societal challenges, what matters is the relationship between hope and behaviors or hope and policy preferences. In two additional elastic net regressions, Constantino and Weber (2023) identify the most important predictors of climate action and support for an emissions standards policy, respectively. Although not the most important predictor of either climate action or policy support, hope in the future is an important and positive predictor of both types of action, alongside worry. These findings suggest a strong affective component of both personal climate action and policy support.