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Facilitating system-level behavioural climate action using computational social science

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 155–156 (2023) Cite this article

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Recently, a Comment in Nature Human Behaviour recommended the collection of large-scale behavioural datasets through public data observatories to enable system-level climate action1. Computational social science (CSS) approaches offer important tools to use these large-scale datasets to facilitate climate action.

The time for substantial climate action is now, and public opinion matters in people-centric system-level change. The urgency of this message means that sweeping social, political and economic changes are necessary. Improving the public’s understanding of climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies is crucial. Jenny and Betsch proposed these large-scale behavioural datasets can enable system-level climate action through public data observatories1. Although important, their proposal raises considerable challenges in ensuring the political neutrality of the data, protecting privacy in open datasets, adhering to internationally agreed-upon scientific practices, making the data relevant to policy, and sustaining the funding required to collect international and representative cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys1.

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Fig. 1: CSS-enabled behavioural climate action.
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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cambridge Zero, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Ramit Debnath

  2. Division of Humanities and Social Science, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Ramit Debnath & R. Michael Alvarez

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Sander van der Linden

  4. Institute for Global Sustainability, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Benjamin K. Sovacool

  5. Department of Business and Technology, Aarhus University, Herning, Denmark

    Benjamin K. Sovacool

  6. Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School, Brighton, UK

    Benjamin K. Sovacool

Authors
  1. Ramit Debnath
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  2. Sander van der Linden
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  3. R. Michael Alvarez
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  4. Benjamin K. Sovacool
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Correspondence to Ramit Debnath.

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Debnath, R., van der Linden, S., Alvarez, R.M. et al. Facilitating system-level behavioural climate action using computational social science. Nat Hum Behav 7, 155–156 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01527-7

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