Since Chinese households account for more than half of the country’s total carbon emissions, efforts focused on consumption will be key to reaching carbon reduction targets. The Individual Low-carbon Behavior Rewarding System (ILBRS) is an emerging mechanism in China that encourages the public to develop a low-carbon lifestyle and it is critical to look for various approaches to enhance the public’s willingness to participate in it. The framing effect has been widely used to study pro-environmental behavior as a low-cost nudge. We used an online questionnaire (N = 320) to investigate how framing information (loss and gain framing) influenced people’s willingness to participate in the ILBRS through the mediation of environmental risk perception. The results indicated that the public’s willingness to participate in the ILBRS under the loss frame was significantly higher than the gain frame. Furthermore, environmental risk perception played a mediating role in the proceedings. Based on our findings, the designers and promoters of ILBRS systems could employ loss-frame information to promote the public’s willingness to participate in the ILBRS and drive more people to live a low-carbon life in the process of mechanism construction, information communication, and operational promotion.

This paper extends the concept of psychological ownership to the general natural environment, clarifies the concept of environmental psychological ownership, and analyzes the formation mechanism of environmental psychological ownership from three dimensions. According to the results of structural equation model based on data obtained from the questionnaire survey, pro-environment investment, environmental self-efficacy, and environmental knowledge are all positively associated with the individual’s environmental psychological ownership, among which the correlation between environmental knowledge and environmental psychological ownership is the strongest. In addition, the environmental psychological ownership positively predicts the individual’s pro-environmental intentions. The conclusion of the study can guide how to strengthen the environmental psychological ownership, thus providing a new perspective for pro-environmental behavior intervention.