How do we reinforce climate action?

Humanity has a shrinking window to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet climate action is still lacking on both individual and policy levels. We argue that this is because behavioral interventions have largely neglected the basic principles of operant conditioning as one set of tools to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sustainability science 2024-07, Vol.19 (4), p.1503-1517
Main Authors: Zhao, Jiaying, Radke, Jade, Chen, Frances S., Sachdeva, Sonya, Gershman, Samuel J., Luo, Yu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaption
Behavior modification
Carbon
Climate action
Climate change
Climate Change Management and Policy
Climate Change Mitigation
Conditioning
Earth and Environmental Science
Emissions
Emissions control
Energy
Environment
Environmental Economics
Environmental Management
Fossil fuels
Government subsidies
Greenhouse gases
Infrastructure
Landscape Ecology
Net zero
Operant conditioning
Overview Article
Plant-based foods
Public Health
Public transportation
Reinforcement
Renewable resources
Resilience
Science
Sustainable Development
Vegetarianism
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Summary:Humanity has a shrinking window to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet climate action is still lacking on both individual and policy levels. We argue that this is because behavioral interventions have largely neglected the basic principles of operant conditioning as one set of tools to promote collective climate action. In this perspective, we propose an operant conditioning framework that uses rewards and punishments to shape transportation, food, waste, housing, and civic actions. This framework highlights the value of reinforcement in encouraging the switch to low-emission behavior, while also considering the benefit of decreasing high-emission behavior to expedite the transition. This approach also helps explain positive and negative spillovers from behavioral interventions. This paper provides a recipe to design individual-level and system-level interventions to generate and sustain low-emission behavior to help achieve net zero emissions.
ISSN:1862-4065
1862-4057
DOI:10.1007/s11625-024-01486-6