Energy projects aimed at a sustainable energy transition can trigger strong negative emotions and resistance from the public. While practitioners are increasingly realising that they cannot simply ignore public emotions, they struggle with how to deal with people’s emotional responses and how to secure public acceptability of sustainable energy projects. We argue that a first critical step in order to adequately address emotional responses to energy projects is to understand where these emotional responses come from. We introduce a value-based approach, which entails that different characteristics of energy projects may violate or support people’s core values, which evokes emotions in people. We present a theoretical framework of the relationship between people’s values, the (perceived) implications of energy projects for these values, and people’s emotional responses to energy projects. We give examples from case studies in the literature to substantiate our reasoning, and we offer directions for future research. Our novel approach provides critical insights for project developers, decision makers, engineers, and scientists who aim to better understand the human dimension of a sustainable energy transition.

Sustainable lifestyle changes are an important demand-side solution to reducing CO₂ emissions. While sustainable lifestyles are increasingly included in integrated assessment models, modellers have so far not managed to realistically model what drives changes in lifestyles. Important questions about the feasibility and likelihood of lifestyle change, and how lifestyle changes can be accelerated or promoted thus go unanswered. Environmental psychology is a discipline dedicated to understanding environmental behaviour, and its theories and findings could therefore be instrumental to informing the modelling of lifestyle change in integrated assessment models. Yet, we identify two barriers currently hindering the systematic integration of this knowledge into integrated assessment modelling. The first barrier is plurality: there are many theories and findings that are potentially relevant to modelling lifestyle change, but guidance is lacking on which to apply when. The second barrier is ambiguity: many theories in psychology are not precise enough to unambiguously translate them into a mathematical model. To overcome the barrier of plurality, we introduce the Motivation, Agency, and Past behaviour (MAP) framework, which summarises and integrates the insights of 8 prominent behavioural theories used in environmental psychology and that can be used to determine which theories and determinants are most relevant for specific modelling applications. To overcome the barrier of ambiguity, we identify three areas where the precision of theorizing in environmental psychology can be improved, namely definitions and consistent use of constructs, the specification of relationships between constructs, and describing the strength and boundary conditions of these relationships. We urge for closer collaborations between modellers and environmental psychologists to successfully model the drivers and impacts of sustainable lifestyle change.

Stimulating public participation in decision making is heralded as a way to get climate policies accepted by the public. Yet, little is known about whether and when public participation can increase policy acceptability. This is true in particular of practices organized by responsible parties to engage the public in decision making. Based on a vast body of interdisciplinary literature, four types of normative standards for effective public participation can be distilled, which I call the four Ds: dialogue, decision‐making power, diversity, and deliberation. However, normative standards may not be enough for reaching socially acceptable climate policies, if people do not want to participate, or want to participate too late in decision making, and are not open to different perspectives. The result can be fake participation, exclusion, and polarization—all which may reduce, rather than increase, public acceptability of climate policies. Understanding public preferences for participation is therefore critical for the implementation of the four Ds and for reaching socially acceptable climate policies. This Perspective article is relevant for scientists, policy makers, NGO's, businesses, interest groups, and other parties wanting to understand how to engage the public in climate decision making.This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate Change Policy and Governance > Governing Climate Change in Communities, Cities, and Regions

Environmental frames are widely used in an effort to increase public support for energy sources in the sustainable energy transition. Research suggests that environmental frames are most effective when they are congruent with people’s biospheric values. Yet, this value-congruence account has been mainly tested for promoting behaviors, policies or products that have clear environmental benefits. But what if they do not? For example, what if energy sources are promoted as green but are not seen as such by the public? We extend the value-congruence account by proposing that besides the congruence between the frames and biospheric values, it is important to consider how much the products themselves are congruent with environmental frames and biospheric values. We tested this novel value-frame-product account by evaluating the effectiveness of environmental frames (versus financial frames) on the acceptability of energy sources that are typically seen as high, moderate, and low in environmental friendliness, and depending on how strongly people endorse biospheric values. Overall, the results supported none of the congruence accounts, suggesting that matching frames (and products) with people’s values might be less effective in enhancing acceptability of products than previously thought. Instead, environmental framing increased the acceptability of all energy sources, independent of people’s biospheric values and the perceived environmental friendliness of those energy sources. Moreover, highly environmentally friendly energy sources were more acceptable and evaluated more positively, especially among people who strongly endorsed biospheric values. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study.

Public acceptability of energy projects depends on people’s trust in agents responsible for those projects. We examined to what extent different dimensions of trust, notably integrity- and competence-based trust, are associated with public acceptability of real ongoing energy projects associated with acute risks and other consequences. A series of questionnaire studies in the Netherlands revealed that both integrity- and competence-based trust were positively associated with public acceptability of natural gas extraction which causes earthquakes in the region. Yet, integrity-based trust was more strongly and consistently associated with public acceptability of the natural gas extraction compared to competence-based trust. The findings were rather consistent across four different measurement phases. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.