Last year was the hottest on record. For the first time, the annual average global temperature pierced the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold set by the Paris Agreement a decade earlier. That threshold was established by the 195 nations that signed the agreement in 2015 in an attempt to limit the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
While the threshold was an ambitious target, scientists and policymakers hoped that at that level the worst effects of a warming planet—including increased frequency of extreme weather, irreversible damage to ecosystems, climate-related migration and deaths, and sea level rise—could be mitigated and managed.
Only 10 years later, the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold is in the rearview mirror.
Should we be surprised? Last year wasn’t just the hottest on record, it was also a record year for fossil fuel consumption (including a record year for coal). We also set a record for global forest loss in 2024, losing an area the size of Panama.
Meanwhile, in one of his first actions as president, Donald Trump withdrew the United States—the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gasses—from the Paris Agreement for a second time. He also rolled back a number of climate friendly policies, opened up drilling and mining on public land, and made cuts to agencies tasked with ensuring Americans have clean air, land, and water.
Yet there were some bright spots. In 2024, global renewable energy capacity reached new heights, as did electric vehicle adoption. The U.K. closed its last coal-fired power plant, countries like Ecuador, Brazil, and New Zealand added legal protections to natural resources, and researchers showed that conservation efforts are effective at helping retain critical biodiversity.
Against this backdrop, a group of social and behavioral scientists focused on climate change convened earlier this year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS). The convening was led by CASBS’s director, sociologist Sarah Soule (incoming dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business), sociologist Edward Walker, professors of management Brayden King and Wren Montgomery, and professor of business economics and public policy Thomas Lyon.
Over two days, I joined a group of more than 40 scholars from across the social and behavioral sciences and those working in adjacent fields at the Center. This included economists, sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists, as well as those working in climate science, engineering, journalism, public policy, and law.
The goal was to address the “backlash, burnout, and backsliding” happening in the realm of climate action and to identify ways to achieve a sustainable future. After crossing the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold and the new wave of Trump administration policies, it was a chance to reflect on what had and hadn’t worked and reevaluate what a successful path forward might look like.
After the convening, I asked participants to reflect on the most pressing issues and questions on their minds. Below, you’ll find 11 perspectives. Together they offer a glimpse into some of the ways social and behavioral scientists from a range of disciplines are thinking about how to address climate change. You’ll find perspectives addressing the need for technological and social innovation, the importance of emphasizing co-benefits to spur climate action, the role social movements might play, the toxicity of greenwashing, and more.
Of course a brief collection can’t offer a definitive way forward, but it can help bring together views that might not otherwise be seen side-by-side and perhaps offer a new jumping off point for mitigating climate change. Because even though we’ve crossed the 1.5 threshold, it doesn’t mean climate efforts no longer matter. In fact, action is more urgent than ever.
— Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief
The power of ‘how’
Rene Almeling
Climate scientists, activists, and journalists routinely lament the lack of progress on addressing climate change. Why, they ask, is more not being done? After all, the threats from climate change have been apparent in the data since the mid-twentieth century. And yet, again and again, the response from those with power to enact change has been insufficient to meet the challenge, to say the least. Instead of throwing up our hands and continuing to ask why there is such a disconnect between knowledge and action, I think we need to take a page from qualitative social science and shift to a how question: How has the massive quantity of climate knowledge resulted in such inaction?
How has the massive quantity of climate knowledge resulted in such inaction?
Whereas “why” questions tend to result in singular answers that offer clear explanations—e.g., political polarization or corporate interests—“how” questions prod us to explore a wider array of historical processes, social mechanisms, and cultural norms that led to the current moment. Think about the difference in your answer to these two questions: Why are you reading this article? How did you come to read this article?
Asking how the powerful continue to disregard the existential threat of climate change will undoubtedly surface many already-familiar explanations, but I hope that shifting the question would uncover historical and social processes that have not received as much attention, such as how privilege enables everyday ignoring, or how complacency shades so easily into complicity. And perhaps with a more expansive analysis of how climate knowledge has resulted in climate inaction, the complexity of our response would be better aligned with the complexity of the problem, all with the goal of identifying new pathways for spurring action on the climate crisis.
Rene Almeling is professor of sociology at Yale University. Using a range of qualitative, historical, and quantitative methods, her work examines questions about how biological bodies and cultural norms interact to influence scientific knowledge, markets, and individual experiences. She is the author of Sex Cells, GUYnecology, and co-editor of Seminal (with Lisa Campo-Engelstein and Brian T. Nguyen).
Making sense of the anthropocene
William P. Barnett
How we construe a problem determines how we try to solve it, and so it is with environmental sustainability. Three different construals of sustainability are common in public discourse, each revealing important aspects of the challenge.
Many construe sustainability as a technical issue. They attend to the physical and biological processes involved. This lens focuses attention on problems such as global warming due to an increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, or on biodiversity loss due to development. Guided by this lens we look for technical solutions, such as renewable power or species preservation and resource conservation.
Others see sustainability through a behavioral lens, asking why humanity threatens the very environment we rely on for life. This lens explains behaviors at various levels, from why individual-level choices favor today over tomorrow, to why organization-level strategies seek profits despite environmental costs, to why collective action fails to safeguard nature. The behavioral lens helps craft Interventions at all levels.
Still others view sustainability through a moral lens, highlighting the right and wrong of environmental problems. This lens reveals the unfair distribution of environmental costs and benefits over space and time, where those least responsible for environmental damage are the most affected. Advocates of environmental justice construe sustainability in these moral terms.
I propose that change will be more effective if it is informed by all three lenses. Such changes will be technically effective, behaviorally sound, and morally acceptable.
William P. Barnett chairs the Department of Environmental Social Sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and directs the Stanford Initiative on Business and Environmental Sustainability at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is also the faculty director of the Stanford Executive Program.
Bringing in social innovation
Patricia Bromley
We don’t need to wait for the next big technology breakthrough to generate solutions to the climate crisis—plenty of new ideas and approaches are at our fingertips if we can expand the range of ideas and approaches at the core of climate governance. Few realize the extent to which a narrow set of worldviews dominate the most influential conversations about how to solve the climate problem.
For example, in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change leadership teams for Working Group II (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) and III (Mitigation of Climate Change), none of the current co-chairs or vice chairs are from the social sciences or humanities; both leadership teams are solely engineers, natural scientists, plus a handful of policymakers and practitioners.
The big question that we ought to be asking is not about technology or measurement, it is about social innovation.
This omission is critical because the social sciences and humanities could play a crucial role in addressing the climate crisis by providing insight into human behavior, societal change, and issues of justice. While the natural sciences and engineering provide technical solutions like renewable energy and carbon capture, the social sciences explore how and why people adopt and implement these innovations or why they reject innovations. The social sciences and humanities tell us that business as usual with some technological advancements can’t solve this problem.
So the big question that we ought to be asking is not about technology or measurement, it is about social innovation: How can we help individuals and societies embrace the fundamental changes that are required of our economies, societies, and governments to transition to more sustainable ways of living?
Patricia Bromley is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education, the Doerr School of Sustainability, and (by courtesy) sociology at Stanford University. She is the director of the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR) and co-director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS).
Co-benefits and collective action framing
Sarah A. Soule, Brayden King, and Edward Walker
In thinking about something that we should be doing more of to move the needle on climate change, we would do well to emphasize the co-benefits of sustainability initiatives. Doing so will help mobilize more people to participate in sensible climate action, whether collectively or individually.
Co-benefits are the positive, sometimes unintended, outcomes that arise from sustainability initiatives that go beyond their primary environmental goals. These include things like improved public health, more jobs, and economic savings.
The idea of co-benefits resonates with the literature on collective action frames, as articulated by social movement scholars Dave Snow and Rob Benford. Collective action frames are interpretive frameworks used by social movements to shape how people understand a problem and what should be done about it. Frames help mobilize people by providing a shared meaning and motivation for action.
Successful social movements are good at frame bridging and frame extension, which when applied to sustainability involves connecting sustainability efforts with other issues or concerns, such as public health or economic development.
For example, renewable energy policies could be framed not only as environmental solutions but also as job creation strategies, potentially attracting labor advocates. Similarly, urban greening projects could be linked to public health movements focused on reducing air pollution and chronic disease. Stanford professor Rob Jackson’s research underscores the power of co-benefits in sustainability, showing that policies aimed at reducing emissions also improve public health and economic stability. His work highlights how framing climate action around these tangible benefits builds broader support, even among those less motivated by environmental concerns.
By leveraging co-benefits, advocates of sensible climate action can expand their appeal. Effective sustainability campaigns mirror successful social movements by framing their message in ways that resonate across different constituents, turning abstract environmental concerns into tangible, relatable benefits.
Sarah A. Soule is the incoming dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. She is also the Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior. Her research applies social movement theory to organizational processes, and organizational theory to social movement processes.
Brayden King is the Max McGraw Chair of Management and the Environment and a professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University. His research focuses on how social movement activists influence corporate social responsibility, organizational change, and legislative policymaking.
Edward Walker is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research examines the political activities of corporations and social movements, including how corporations intervene in public life through mobilizing grassroots campaigns and partnering with nonprofit organizations, the ways that business contexts structure the tactical choices of protest groups, and the relationship between fully professionalized (or “non-membership”) advocacy organizations and traditional membership organizations.
Tap into the need for connection
Nicole Ardoin and Alison W. Bowers
As concerns related to climate change have emerged and grown, so too has a focus on individual behavior through the promotion of actions such as recycling and home energy conservation, resulting in ideas like the carbon footprint and “100 things you can do to save the planet.” Although individual behavior is certainly part of an overall climate solution, we know individual actions alone are insufficient. To transform structural barriers that will stem climate change and the worst of its impacts, we must motivate and support collective action while working systemically.
Because it is not part of the everyday vernacular, collective action can be a daunting term, with unclear motivators, pathways, and outcomes. But at its core, collective action is about people working together. The most elegant and impactful climate solutions do not have to be complicated; simply bringing people together and encouraging aligned work toward a common goal is a solid start.
Climate-related activities like building neighborhood solar projects or joining climate advocacy groups are certainly helpful, but so are climate-adjacent initiatives like improving public spaces, organizing community volunteer days, and hosting community-gardening gatherings. All these build social cohesion, trust, and sense of belonging—prerequisites for tackling larger challenges together in a sustained way. Every community has schools, public libraries, neighborhood centers, parks, places of worship, and other third spaces where people can come together, learn from each other, and solve problems iteratively, creating a flywheel of success, support, and engagement.
By reframing climate action as a joyful opportunity for community-building rather than sacrifice, we tap into the fundamental human need for connection. Through such strengthened bonds, we lay the groundwork for societal change that creates meaningful climate progress. Along the way, we not only build a more climate-friendly future but also resilient communities ready to address a range of societal challenges.
Nicole Ardoin is an associate professor of environmental behavioral sciences in the Environmental Social Sciences Department of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She is also a senior fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment. She and her Social Ecology Lab research motivations for and barriers to environmental behavior at the individual and collective scales.
Alison W. Bowers is a senior researcher in the Social Ecology Lab at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She earned her Ph.D, in educational research and evaluation from Virginia Tech.
Don’t neglect a political economy perspective
Marco Casari
When discussing the obstacles to global mitigation action, we should consider behavioral factors without neglecting a political economy perspective. Factors such as short-sightedness, inability to cooperate, or lack of information are relevant to account for inaction. On a positive note, consider that the world has succeeded in addressing the problem of ozone layer depletion, which exhibited similar behavioral challenges to the ones relevant for climate change today. Such events can provide a rationale for hope.
When discussing the obstacles to global mitigation action, we should consider behavioral factors without neglecting a political economy perspective.
However, there may be deeper reasons why many do not seem to truly want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or want a strong international agreement. From a political economy perspective the issues of ozone layer and climate change appear quite different. First, we must acknowledge that powerful special interests such as the fossil fuel and agricultural sectors oppose climate policies and have captured politicians, the media, and even academia.
Second, it is a common understanding that climate mitigation will benefit disproportionately poor countries rather than rich ones, because they are in tropical regions. Moreover, even when we look within each country, wealthy individuals are far less vulnerable to climate impacts than poor individuals.
In short, it is the political economy of climate change that may explain inaction.
Marco Casari is a professor of economics at the University of Bologna. His research focuses on behavior in social dilemmas, decision-making in climate change, and social norms. Using experimental and institutional economics, he explores the behavioral obstacles that hinder cooperation in climate mitigation policies.
Divide and conquer
Roger Noll
Despite surveys showing strong public support for policies to curtail emissions of greenhouse gases, little progress has been made. Part of the problem is effective resistance by a unified front of firms in fossil fuel industries. As with most regulatory policy issues, actions to arrest climate change suffer from a classic “mobilization bias” problem: those who bear the costs of the effective policies (fossil fuel industries) have large per capita stakes in resistance while benefits are more widely spread and uncertain, and so less effectively organized.
Perhaps experiences decades ago in achieving economic deregulation of several competitive industries provides a useful lesson on how to break the logjam. The lesson is divide and conquer: Find ways to include projects that benefit some emitters and softens their resistance.
One possibility is R&D subsidies for technologies that are widely disfavored among advocates of strong policies to arrest climate change. An example is subsidies for R&D on carbon recapture, which is being pursued by some large oil and gas companies as a way to preserve their core business in a world of net zero emissions.
Roger Noll is professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University. Noll is also a senior fellow and member of the Advisory Board at the American Antitrust Institute. Prior to joining Stanford, he was a senior economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and institute professor of social science at the California Institute of Technology.
The toxicity of greenwashing
Thomas Lyon and Wren Montgomery
Communication that misleads people into adopting overly positive beliefs about an organization’s environmental performance is known as greenwash. Greenwash is ubiquitous, and most consumers are familiar with it as yet another marketing gimmick. To us, though, it is much more than that. Greenwash has two faces, both pernicious, that act as barriers to climate progress.
First, greenwash lulls well-intentioned people into believing the climate crisis will be solved through business and markets, and we don’t need public policy. One version of this illusion comes in the form of “ESG investing”—that is, investments that incorporate environmental, social, and governance criteria. With multiple claims that ESG has been largely greenwash, investors may be getting ripped off while believing they are “doing well by doing good.” The more dangerous part of the ESG illusion, however, is the belief that the power of finance alone will solve the climate crisis.
Second, greenwash begets political backlash from powerful interests who believe the hype. In the case of ESG investing, the oil and gas industry, a powerful lobbying juggernaut, got to work funding the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which slapped asset managers with antitrust suits for allegedly “colluding.” This backlash led many asset managers to abandon their stated commitments to investing in clean energy.
For climate, the two faces of greenwash come together in a toxic fashion: Those who want to solve the climate crisis are distracted from taking action, while those who want to profit from it are mobilized to block action.
Thomas Lyon holds the Dow Chair of Sustainable Science, Technology and Commerce at the University of Michigan, with appointments in both the Ross School of Business and the School for Environment and Sustainability. His research covers self-regulation, regulatory preemption, voluntary environmental programs, greenwashing, astroturfing, and corporate nonmarket strategy.
Wren Montgomery is an associate professor of management and sustainability, and JJ Wettlaufer Faculty Fellow at the Ivey Business School at Western University, Canada, as well as a faculty affiliate at the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Enterprise. Her research on firm environmental communications has been pivotal in defining greenwash and its tactics, and informing strategies to stop it.
Climate action depends on repairing moral relations
Gwen Ottinger
At the heart of our climate crisis lie damaged moral relations. In particular, not everyone can reasonably hope that, if they are wronged, others will acknowledge the injuries they’ve suffered, affirm that they are owed better, and do their best to ensure that those responsible are compelled to make it right.
People breathing the worst of fossil fuel pollution must fight to be believed about the ways their health has suffered. People losing their homes to climate-fueled natural disasters know better than to suppose that oil company executives will be called to account. And people who are losing their livelihoods in the transition away from fossil fuels struggle to have their integrity acknowledged.
Effective, collective action on climate change requires restoring that hope to everyone. But that isn’t as easy as taking Exxon or Chevron to court for their misdeeds. It also involves acknowledging that former fossil fuel workers took on hard, dirty, hazardous work on behalf of a carbon-hungry society. It involves understanding how they are wronged by facility and mine closures, and by the dearth of comparable middle-class, unionized jobs.
Like the majority of the population, fossil fuel workers may well recognize that continuing to emit greenhouse gasses is inexcusable. Yet those of us keen on climate action can hardly expect them to embrace that emerging moral consensus and stick up for those harmed by climate change, until they have good reason to hope that wrongs against them won’t continue to be ignored and minimized. If we wish to overcome so-called partisan divides, we need to attend to healing damaged moral relations.
Gwen Ottinger is a professor at Drexel University in the department of politics and the Center for Science, Technology, and Society. They direct the Fair Tech Collective, a research group that uses social science to promote justice in science and technology. They are the author of Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges.
Where will people go?
Alice Farmer
What keeps me up at night is human mobility caused by climate change. We are looking at some pretty alarming predictions about how many people may need to move because of drought, salinated earth, repeated flooding, excessive heat, and more. Our refugee system was largely built for conflict, and dates back to World War II. We need new ideas to help people displaced by climate move with dignity.
Our refugee system was largely built for conflict, and dates back to World War II. We need new ideas to help people displaced by climate move with dignity.
There is innovation—while many governments are slamming doors shut, we see welcoming communities extending a hand in many corners of the world. Women’s savings clubs in small-scale fishing areas help communities choose to make infrastructure more resilient after a disaster; family, friends, and religious institutions open doors for shelter from wildfires; and remittances sent from family members abroad can help communities decide to relocate to higher ground.
We need local, national, and international government stakeholders to support locally grown solutions like these, scale them, and adapt them to new settings. This is urgent work. Governments should support their citizens’ drive to welcome those in need, instead of retreating in fear.
Alice Farmer is a refugee lawyer studying how climate change alters the international legal framework of forced displacement. Currently a CASBS fellow, she has spent two decades in humanitarian work for the UN and NGOs. She is developing a climate mobility lab that uses interdisciplinary study to equip governments and other stakeholders with the necessary research to form human-rights centered policies in response to climate-change-induced displacement.
Is the climate movement in the streets or the courtroom?
Sidney Tarrow
Over the last decade, there has been a sharp increase in the number of court cases fighting climate change in the United States—more than in the rest of the world put together, as data collected by the Sabin Center shows. Although we do not yet have comparable data, there has been a similar surge in climate protests around the world. How—if at all—are these two streams of climate activism connected?
In my research, drawing on social movement research, I have been identifying three kinds of relationships. The first is a complete disconnect between the two forms of activism. The second is what I call fusion, when legal advocates merge their efforts with those of protesters. The third is “synergy,” the coordination of legal and activist efforts by different actors within the same broad movement.
The next step will be to choose a sample from the records of climate cases from the Sabin Center database and code each one for the presence or absence of these three types and, where possible, their eventual outcomes.
I hypothesize that while a disconnect wastes or duplicates efforts and fusion is unlikely between activists with different strategies and types of organization, synergies are the most hopeful for progress in fighting climate change.
Sidney Tarrow is Maxwell M. Upson Professor Emeritus in the Government Department at Cornell University, where he specializes in social movements, contentious politics and legal mobilization. Before coming to Cornell, he taught at Yale University.
