Visualizing climate catastrophes may spur people to act.

Many people view climate change as a distant, abstract threat. But having them imagine the tangible consequences of resulting droughts or floods may help shift this perception and encourage proenvironmental behavior, a new study suggests.

Researchers asked 93 college students in Taiwan to read a report on temperature anomalies, floods, and other climate change-related events that have affected the island. The scientists then asked 62 of the participants to write down three ways in which such phenomena might impact their future lives. Half the people in that group were instructed to imagine such scenarios in detail, including specific individuals and settings. The remaining 31 students did not complete either the writing or imagining steps, acting as a control group.

All the participants then rated their perceptions of climate change risks by responding to prompts such as “How likely do you think it is that climate change is having serious impacts on the world?” They used a scale from 1 (“very unlikely”) to 7 (“very likely”). The average score was higher among subjects who had been asked to envision detailed scenarios than among those who had not. The results were later confirmed in a second experiment involving 102 participants.

Individuals in the first experiment who had visualized the effects of climate change were subsequently more likely to say they would use air conditioning in an energy-saving manner. In the second experiment, nearly two thirds of people in the visualizing group signed up to help clean a beach, compared with 43 percent in the nonvisualizing one. And when offered a choice of a vegetarian or nonvegetarian lunch box, nearly half the visualizers selected the environmentally friendlier meatless option—compared with about 28 percent of the nonvisualizers, the researchers reported…

Agata Blaszczak-Boxe. Reproduced with permission. Copyright © 2018 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.