Leveraging Social Science to Generate Lasting Engagement with Climate Change Solutions

Summary Action on climate change is urgently needed. Because the climate crisis is a wicked problem driven by human activities, it requires social solutions. Although previous research has led to significant progress in our understanding of how to effectively communicate the existence and seriousness of climate change—and how to motivate people to behave in ways that help mitigate it—relatively little research has investigated the factors that lead to enduring change. In this Perspective, we highlight three promising areas of research that can inform efforts to answer the question of how to generate enduring change—deep engagement, general mental models, and social norms—and propose a research agenda aimed at generating enduring motivation to act on climate change.