Climate-Just Behavior

Foundations and Transformational Approaches

Susanne Stoll-Kleemann, Susanne Nicolai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780367471163
• eBook ISBN: 9781040116067
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book highlights the obstacles to and potential for a just transformation as a way out of the current climate crisis.

This volume examines the barriers, opportunities and incentives around the pursuit of climate-just behavior, based on a comprehensive interdisciplinary and integrative analysis. It investigates how the gap between expressing concern about the climate crisis and giving it a high priority within the context of everyday behavior can be overcome. At the same time, it looks at the challenging politico-economic framework conditions such as the strong economic growth and profit orientation of capitalism. Although justice is a fundamental human motive, which should induce climate-just behavior, system justification is common and makes people rather justify their unjust behavior. In this book, a general and systemic framework on human behavior is provided, including internal factors, such as knowledge and psychological needs, external factors, such as socio-cultural and politico-economic factors, feedback loops and interactions. The authors draw on multiple theories to examine how denial and moral disengagement affect individual responsibility, despite real-world evidence of the climate crisis. The book highlights the role of emotions in encouraging a pro-environmental response and discusses solutions on both the individual and the collective level, such as transparency laws. Moreover, making climate-friendly options more accessible, affordable and convenient facilitates behavior change more effectively. Overall, this book presents knowledge-based, realistic approaches to surmounting these obstacles in order to achieve a more climate-just world.

Climate-Just Behavior will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, climate justice, environmental geography and environmental psychology.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• 1 Overview and Introduction
• 2 A Psychological Perspective on Justice and Injustice
• 3 The Complexity of Human Behavior and What This Means for Explaining Climate-Related Behavior
• 4 Justifying Climate-Unjust Individual Behavior: Barriers to Climate Action as Moral Disengagement and Other Forms of Justification
• 5 Toward Climate-Just Behavior: Addressing and Overcoming the Identified Barriers
• Index