Back in December, we looked back on 2024 and presented our group members’ activities in numbers. While the amount of summer school students we had and the number of papers we published are achievements to take pride in, we felt it was just as important to take a moment to reflect on the research insights that happened over the past year and to consider their impact on the field of environmental psychology moving forward.


We asked all of the senior researchers in our group what they felt was the most significant scientific breakthrough from within our department and among our former colleagues from the past 12 months. Here’s what they had to say:

Thijs Bouman:

Our behavior influences society even more than we previously thought, not just in the short term but also in reaching societal tipping points. But that behavior is still constrained by barriers.

In Madeline Judge’s paper from May, we found that perceiving pro-environmental behavior as the morally correct thing to do may initially generate social friction that delays tipping points, but it can accelerate change at later stages by increasing social pressure on laggards.

And in light of recent election wins by parties that either question or deny climate change, it should not be underestimated that majorities demand more—not less—governmental climate action. In our November paper, we explained why votes for new-right political parties should not be interpreted as votes against governmental climate action, and that there is societal readiness to make changes

 

Elliot Sharpe:

Plasticity – the proportion of people that could be induced to change their behaviour under a particular set of policies, opportunities and constraints – is making a comeback.

In her paper from January 2024, Julia Koch and her co-authors argued that a 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), and behavioural plasticity. They ultimately found that plasticity is an important additional indicator to identify the types of behaviour relevant for research and policymaking,

 

Lise Jans:

Citizens’ rights and responsibilities need to be better acknowledged and empowered, and community plays a significant role in sustainable action and bottom-up energy citizenship. People want to engage in and get involved in these kinds of actions in order to benefit their community. In a December paper, my co-authors and I found that the involvement of community members promoted their perceptions of the efficacy in community energy initiatives, but that the involvement of external parties and thereby its acceptability and people’s willingness to join.

We are also beginning to better understand the concept of energy citizenship, which is people’s belief that they as individuals and as collectives have rights and responsibilities for a just and sustainable energy transition, and their motivation to act upon those rights and responsibilities. In Johanna Held’s June paper, which several members of our department co-authored, we saw that energy citizenship is central for achieving energy and climate goals by involving citizens in the energy transition.

And our former colleague Valentina Lozano Nasi is continuing to explore the construct of transilience, which she coined in her 2023 PhD thesis. Transilience is the perceived capacity to persist, adapt flexibly, and positively transform in the face of climate change, and in her April paper, Valentina found that collective transilience was the only significant predictor of individual adaptation behaviours.

Goda Perlaviciute:

Public participation creates support when it’s well done, and there’s no one size fits all approach to citizens assemblies. In July, I wrote about how every step of citizens assemblies could be transformed to elicit citizens’ values: from citizen selection, to setting the remit, facilitating the discussion, and shaping and institutionalizing policy recommendations.

Gabriel Muiños Trujillo:

Having a voice in the process matters more to citizens than being able to decide what policy is implemented. Politicians shouldn’t assume that people just want power, and they should know that they want to participate in the process.

Together with Goda and our former colleague Wytse Gorter, we published research in November that found decision-making power is not the key driver of public acceptability of the Dutch Citizens Assembly on Energy, but rather engaging in dialogue and deliberation.

Impact


These research insights and others are already having real-world impact in the Netherlands. Citizens assemblies are popping up all over the country, including the first
national climate citizens assembly which started on 18 January, and invitations for another assembly on the municipal level focused on waste disposal in Groningen went out in mid-January. 

Activities like the Top van Onderop (part of the National Climate Platform), which provides a podium for successful sustainable initiatives, also embody Lise Jans’ findings about the value of energy citizenship and Thijs Bouman’s research about how widespread support is for pro-environmental behavior.

And last year, The Hague became the first municipality worldwide to ban advertising for fossil fuel-based industries, a move which was influenced by an advisory report that Thijs Bouman and our former colleague Jan Willem Bolderdijk co-authored along with other researchers.

What do you think the biggest breakthroughs in environmental psychology were over the past year? What insights are you looking forward to learning more about this year? What are your favorite examples of seeing environmental psychology research being applied in the real world?