A new hope or phantom menace? Exploring climate emotions and public support for climate interventions across 30 countries.

Abstract

Emotions are central to human experiences of climate change. Empirical research demonstrates their importance for climate perceptions and climate-related behaviors. The intensifying severity of climate change prompts consideration of emerging, potentially controversial technologies. Alongside mitigation and adaptation, climate intervention proposes to remove carbon dioxide from ambient air (carbon dioxide removal, CDR) or reflect sunlight away from the Earth (solar radiation modification, SRM). Although such options arouse emotional reactions of diverse kinds, the intersection between climate emotions and climate intervention has received limited attention. This article employed a unique, global dataset with 30,284 participants across 30 countries (in 19 languages) to provide insights on 3 questions. We first leveraged the global dataset to map the incidence of fear, hope, anger, sadness, and worry across countries-the first time the climate emotions of adults are investigated on this scale. We also identified significant differences in emotions by level of development, with those in advanced economies reporting weaker levels of climate emotions. Second, using multiple linear regression analyses, we explored the relationship between climate emotions and support for climate-intervention technologies. We determined that the emotions of hope and worry seem to be the most consistently (positively) correlated. Third, we explored if reading about technology categories differentially affected climate emotions. Individuals randomly assigned to read about ecosystems-based CDR were significantly more hopeful about climate change (those about SRM the least). Together, our results provide the first global-level evidence of the relationship between discrete climate emotions and perceptions and support of climate interventions.