A smog-free Los Angeles skyline. A pristine view of the Himalayas from northern India, not seen for decades. Clear sight of the Eiffel Tower from Paris suburbs, previously obscured by pollution. And with less travel, less burning of fossil fuels, leading to a projected 8% decrease in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere this year—the largest drop ever recorded, according to the International Energy Agency.
Such striking and unexpected environmental consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are unlikely to continue once the crisis has subsided and life resumes its former pace. But psychologists are using this moment to examine how lessons from COVID-19 might spark long-term improvements in sustainability habits, inform climate change research and communication, and improve community efforts to address climate change.
“We are seeing incredibly rapid shifts in deeply engrained habits that have far-reaching implications for climate change,” says APA Div. 34 (Society for Environmental, Population and Conservation Psychology) President Ezra Markowitz, PhD, an associate professor in the department of environmental conservation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst). “Psychologists are beginning to study the dynamics of these changes and have an important role to play in identifying what our individual and collective responses to the pandemic portend for the future of climate change action.”
Similarities between two crises
Psychologists are starting by taking a big picture look at the similarities and links between the pandemic and climate change, and how those links might inform their work on climate issues.
In general terms, both COVID-19 and climate change are global phenomena that call on people to consider the well-being of our collective society—not just individual or family safety, says APA Board of Directors member Susan Clayton, PhD, a social and environmental psychologist at The College of Wooster in Ohio and a lead author on the upcoming 2021 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“While most of us are not at immediate risk of personal harm [from either crisis], we’re being asked to change our behaviors not primarily to protect ourselves but in order to protect everyone else,” she says.
Another similarity is that COVID-19 has produced “surprising, abrupt, cascading disruptions to social and economic systems,” says Bob Doppelt, PhD, a counseling psychologist and environmental scientist who directs The Resource Innovation Group, a social science sustainability and global climate change organization based in Oregon. Such disruptions are already starting to occur with climate change, he adds, which leads to a higher incidence of natural disasters like flooding and hurricanes.
And as climate change forces both animals and people from their longtime homes and habitats and into closer contact with each other, epidemics and pandemics will likely increase as more disease-carrying animals come in contact with people, according to the World Health Organization.
Finally, COVID-19 is putting a spotlight on issues of social justice that have been of increasing concern to environmental psychologists, as well, Markowitz says. “The interconnections between economic and environmental fragility, the lack of resilience in various parts of the system, the way they disproportionately affect the poor and vulnerable—these are all underlying factors that will shape how and how well we’re able to respond both as individuals and as communities to climate change,” he says.
How psychology applies
Psychological and social science research already offer knowledge relevant to addressing both climate change and the pandemic.
One long-standing body of research, for example, shows that changing habits and habits of mind, though notoriously difficult, “is easiest in times of transition,” notes climate psychologist Beth Karlin, PhD, founder of the Transformational Media Lab at the University of California, Irvine, which studies ways that communications technologies can be used to foster positive social change.
For example, a study in the Journal of Environmental Psychologyopens in new window (Vol. 45, 2016) by social psychologists Bas Verplanken, PhD, and Deborah Roy, PhD, of the University of Bath in England, found that people who had just moved residences were more likely to adopt a new sustainable behavior intervention compared with nonmovers who received the same intervention.
In a similar manner, the social, physical and emotional changes wrought by COVID-19 present opportunities to change any number of sustainability behaviors, including travel, transit, shopping, energy choices, volunteer habits and more, Karlin says.
The COVID-19 crisis represents “one of the greatest natural experiments of our lives,” she says. As such, it provides an unprecedented opportunity to investigate crisis-related behavior and the potential of behavior change in real time. For example, Markowitz and UMass Amherst associate professor Brian Lickel, PhD, are launching a survey of some 1,000 Massachusetts residents this summer to examine overlap and divergence in how people are responding to and thinking about COVID-19 and climate change.
Meanwhile, social and environmental psychologist Janet Swim, PhD, a professor at Penn State, and colleagues want to examine the impact of COVID-19 on emotions, particularly among young people who were already angry and anxious about the warming climate. Two hypotheses they plan to test: whether concerns about COVID-19 would override their participants’ emotions about climate change, and whether those concerns would reinforce earlier feelings about climate change, especially among young people who see their futures threatened.
And starting in the fall, a new APA task force on climate change will further examine the connection between pandemics and climate change, thanks to a resolution passed by the APA Council of Representatives in February.
More applications
Environmental psychologists are also thinking about how climate activists and educators can learn from communications strategies around the pandemic. Current wisdom on how to educate people about climate change, for instance, holds that it’s important to use a human touch—images and stories about people—to foster behavior change.
But Karlin sees a potential opportunity for psychologists to adopt media strategies related to the pandemic that communicate hard scientific facts in creative ways. Consider how quickly people picked up new language like “flattening the curve” and “social distancing,” for example, or how infographics have effectively shown how the virus spreads from person to person.
“We may need to rethink the advice to avoid the science in these communications,” she says. “It’s too soon to tell, but it’s definitely a phenomenon worthy of attention.”
Psychologists’ work during the pandemic also provides an opportunity to use and refine some of the techniques and interventions they’ve developed to help communities cope with climate change. Via a network called the International Transformational Resilience Coalition (ITRC), for example, Doppelt and colleagues are sharing a community-based approach to fostering population-level mental wellness and resilience in the face of climate change trauma with behavioral health organizations in Oregon and California that are dealing with the pandemic.
The ITRC model teaches people two sets of psychological skills, relying on best practices from programs that have dealt successfully with issues like gun violence, adverse childhood experiences and earthquake preparedness. One category is “presencing” (self-regulation skills), which helps people calm their minds and bodies and control their behaviors so that they can make wise and skillful decisions. The other is “purposing” (post-traumatic growth skills), which encourages people to face what is happening, learn from it and clarify how they want to live with ongoing adversity. The model also calls for a diversity of neighborhood and community leaders to help adults learn these skills, supported by those in mental health fields.
“It’s important to teach the entire population—all adults, all children—information and skills that help them learn how to foster and sustain their own mental wellness and resilience in the face of these growing emergencies,” Doppelt says.
