Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Renewable energy (RE) sources are often locally available and have the potential to lessen the rural dependence on the national power grid, reducing disruptions in power supplies and the heavy dependence on coal combustion. Poland faces an EU mandate of a 15% share of renewables in energy generation by 2020. However, the installations intended to supply several types of RE encountered local opposition, forcing a cancellation of the planned investments and stressing a need for understanding rural residents’ attitudes towards RE in general. Using survey data, this paper examines the perception of RE importance among rural residents in eastern Poland. The specified empirical relationship includes the sociodemographic and economic characteristics of residents. Perceptions of the links between health and specific sources of environmental pollution and actions demonstrating energy-saving behavior serve as explanatory variables. The performance of the estimated logit equation was rigorously tested. The probability of attaching importance to RE by rural residents increases most if a respondent displayed an energy-saving behavior, has certain demographic characteristics, and links health to environmental pollution caused by coal combustion. The graphic depiction of the effects of selected variables succinctly communicates possible future programs aimed at strengthening the rural population support of RE.