Exploring the Factors Influencing Climate-Friendly Behaviour

Climate change mitigation is the central challenge of the 21st century. An increasing proportion of economic and psychological applied research addresses the question of how to encourage people to adopt more climate-friendly behaviour (Penman und Zabel 2005; Schmitt 2018; Stoknes 2015; Thaler und Sunstein 2008). Although many people think it is important to protect the environment and have a stable proenvironmental behavioural intention, this is reflected only to a limited extent in specific environmental behaviour (Bundesministerium fur Umwelt und Naturschutz und nukleare Sicherheit (BMU) 2019). The present explorative study addresses the question of which measures could foster everyday climate-friendly behaviour. The study focuses on an evaluation of the measure "Klimaschutzburger 2.0" ("Climate Protection Citizens 2.0") undertaken by a local authority in Germany. The explorative study, in which qualitative and quantitative interviews were conducted to generate hypotheses, took place as a participating observation of the last workshop meeting with subsequent written questioning of the participants. Special attention was paid to the question of whether online services such as climate change mitigation apps have a positive impact on behavioural intentions. The primary data collected enable hypotheses to be generated, facilitating the further exploration of the predictors of environmentally responsible behaviour in subsequent projects.