Hybrideseminar: How Can Environmental Psychologists Help Modelers to Better Represent Human Behaviour in Climate Models? Introducing the Motivation, Agency, and Past Behaviour (MAP) Framework

Sustainable lifestyle changes are an important pathway to reduce CO2 emissions, and are accordingly being taken into account in climate models more and more. Yet, models currently represent sustainable lifestyle changes mostly as static assumptions, rather than as endogenously modeled components that dynamically evolve over time. Current modeling approaches thus cannot answer critical questions about when and under which conditions sustainable lifestyle changes are more or less likely to occur. To answer such questions, it is necessary to also model the drivers of sustainable lifestyle change, which include both contextual as well as psychological factors. Environmental psychology is a discipline that is dedicated to understanding and predicting pro-environmental behavior, and can therefore offer key insights to better represent human behavior in climate models. In this talk, I introduce a new meta-theoretical framework that summarizes the most important theoretical insights from the field of environmental psychology: the Motivations, Agency, and Past Behaviour model. I demonstrate how this meta-theoretical framework helps to make the environmental psychology literature more accessible to modelers and other climate experts, and can accelerate the more realistic modeling of sustainable lifestyle changes in climate models.