“Despite the global dimension of climate change, we found local social norms effective in battling it, much like they promote specific behaviors among those ‘keeping up with the Joneses’—or now, the Kardashians,” says lead investigator Stefano Carattini, an assistant professor in Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.

“In other words, raising the visibility of eco-conscious behaviors locally can have an outsized impact on global climate mitigation efforts. At the end of the day, people are very much influenced by what their neighbors do.”

For their work, researchers reviewed the literature on the adoption of green technologies and the demand for carbon offsets, lab and field experiments on climate-friendly behaviors, and analyses of the relationship between trust and environmental outcomes. They examined cooperation at the local level to determine whether some patterns may scale up to the global level.

“To turn country mitigation pledges into policies, like those that collaboratively form the Paris Agreement, an additional layer of cooperation is necessary at the domestic level,” Carattini says. “By looking into the deep roots of individuals’ willingness to cooperate, we’ve attempted to identify the drivers of this cooperation among countries.”

Read the full article taking climate action by Jennifer Rainey Marquez at Futurity.