Plain language summary | From awe to action?

By Lauren Smith, Devon Jones, Avery Deboer-Smith, and Sarah Wolfe

This Plain Language Summary is published in advance of the paper discussed. Please check back soon for a link to the full paper.

Addressing climate change requires a massive shift toward pro-environmental behaviour. These behaviours help protect the environment, drive conservation activities, support environment policies, and increase sustainability across many avenues and sectors.

To facilitate this shift, practitioners and scholars must look beyond rationality-driven motivations to the emotional drivers that shift individuals’ worldviews over the longer term.

Of many possible emotional drivers, we present a critical, systematic scoping review of awe and its connections to pro-environmental behaviour.

Our review findings indicate that even with varied methods, approaches, and measures, awe was repeatedly found to be effective at positively influencing pro-environmental behaviour.

Informed by our findings, we propose that awe merits greater attention because of its documented influence on pro-environmental behaviour, our connection to nature, self-concept, and perceived barriers-to-environmental-action.

We provide a foundation from which interdisciplinary environmental scholars – including those deeply embedded in the connection between people and nature – might design research that incorporates awe as a conceptual context, a methodological framework, or an empirical variable.