While folks here in the Netherlands are still greeting each other with best wishes for the new year, we’re using this slightly slow week getting back to work to share a short overview of the research from our colleagues in 2023.
1. Sustainable entrepreneurs offer new solutions to social/environmental crises and disruptive events by replacing the current linear economies with circular systems.
2. A longitudinal study of the association between trust in energy production-regulating institutions in the Netherlands and public acceptability of natural gas extraction.
3. How do people cope with externally-controlled risks from energy projects, specifically earthquakes induced by gas extraction in their region?
4. What are the psychological determinants of use, and the change techniques to promote use, of decentralized water technologies? We propose a user-focused theory of change to guide promotion.
5. We bridge two disciplines – systems & control and environmental psychology – to jointly study the energy dynamic behavior of humans and corresponding physical dynamics of the microgrid.
6. Do vegan cooking workshops for children strengthen shared identity, pro-vegan or vegetarian norms, attitudes, and dietary intentions?
7. We introduced the construct of transilience to capture people’s perceived capacity to persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of adversity such as climate change risks and Covid-19.
8. We present an interdisciplinary definition of energy citizenship: people’s rights to, and responsibilities for, a just and sustainable energy transition.
9. Through social norms theory, we explore the role of key influencers (partners, parents and friends) in women’s family planning use and how women anticipate normative reactions or sanctions in Peri-urban Nairobi.
10. How does polarization influence environmental decision-making? What strategies could be useful for preventing or reducing the negative consequences of polarization?
11. Despite assumptions to the contrary, there is little evidence to support the prominence of psychological distance of climate change.
12. Which policy measures motivate citizens in rural and semi-rural areas of Lower Austria to use active transport modes for everyday trips?
13. Household energy consumption (HEC) impacts global greenhousegas emissions and can trigger fuel/energy poverty among vulnerable households. HEC needs to be curbed due to environmental policies and geopolitical turmoil limiting the energy supply.
14. Many people worldwide are worried about how earth’s climate is changing with devastating consequences. For some, this worry turns into climate anxiety: pervasive, hard-to-control concern about climate, with complaints like tension & trouble sleeping.
15. Are people more inclined to adapt to climate change if they believe that climate change is real, caused by human behaviour, and/or brings negative consequences?
16. Climate anxiety refers to persistent, hard-to-control apprehension/worry about climatechange. Researching the prevalence, indicators, causes & consequences of climate anxiety is needed, to which emotion researchers can make substantial contributions.
17. One way to develop more socially acceptable energy projects is by engaging people with different values (i.e., guiding principles in people’s lives) from early on in decision-making.
18. Deviants are pivotal to sparking social change, but their influence may be hindered by group dynamics that serve to maintain the status quo. What is the influence of a group’s value in diversity in deviant’s ability to spark social change?
19. Environmental values, self-identity and personal norms do not form in solitude, but in social interactions, and as such could be shaped by the family context. These factors can predict individuals’ environmentally-friendly behaviors.
20. Scholars stress that climate anxiety is a normal, healthy response to climate change that can motivate climate action & shouldn’t be medicalized. What are the consequences of not treating it as a mental health problem?
21. What is the role of transilience in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which posed an even more urgent and acute threat to individuals compared to climate change?
22. How are children’s endorsement of biospheric values, their pro-environmental behaviors, and their perception of their friends’ and peers’ endorsement of biospheric values related? Are they affected by educational programmes at school?
23. Realistic estimation of environmental mitigation potential depends on the environmental benefit that results from a certain circular behaviour, referred to as the ‘theoretical reduction potential’ (TRP) & behavioural plasticity.
