This systematic study casts light on the psychological views on climate activism and offers insightful information about the underlying causes that affect people’s involvement in the fight and struggle against climate change.
Authors
Dipanjan Bagchi, Department of Psychology, CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Delhi NCR, Ghaziabad, India.
Akancha Srivastava, Associate Professor, Jindal School of Psychology and Counseling, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India.
Bhawna Tushir, Department of Psychology, CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Delhi NCR, Ghaziabad, India.
Summary
Scientific evidence has validated the inevitability of global warming and its effect in the form of climate change. There has been an increase in climate strikes and other forms of climate activism in recent years. It is important to understand the research landscape in psychological literature with regards to climate change and climate activism, to help guide future researchers.
The databases of PubMed (Keywords: “climate activism”, “climate change”, “psychology”, n = 1), Google Scholar (Keywords = “climate activism”, “climate change”, “psychology”, n = 200) and Scopus database (Keywords: “climate activism” AND “climate change” AND “psychology”, n = 160) were searched to create the pool of research documents. This was further filtered according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria.
In the first section of this article, we have tried to explore the temporal and geographic growth trends of climate change research and collaborations using R (Bibliometric package). In the second section, we have used a text-mining approach to identify the research topics being explored in the climate change literature. R package tm along with associated packages were used to do the processing and subsequent grouping of the themes.
In order to refine the classification the identified groupings were supervised by the authors. The final documents have been scoured to extract an overall understanding of the existing concepts explored so far and gauge their impact in the realm of climate change research. This systematic study casts light on the psychological views on climate activism and offers insightful information about the underlying causes that affect people’s involvement in the fight and struggle against climate change.
The creation of more effective techniques for encouraging climate activism and utilizing its capacity to inspire significant action to address climate change can be influenced by an understanding of these elements. In order to address the complex issues of climate change, this chapter emphasizes the value of multidisciplinary collaboration amongst psychologists, policymakers, educators, and activists.
Published in: Bagchi, D., Srivastava, A., Tushir, B. (2024). Harnessing the Power of Climate Activism: Insights from Psychological Perspectives on Climate Change Engagement—A Systematic Review. In: Mukhopadhyay, U., Bhattacharya, S., Chouhan, P., Paul, S., Chowdhury, I.R., Chatterjee, U. (eds) Climate Crisis, Social Responses and Sustainability. Climate Change Management. Springer, Cham.
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