Climate Creativity for Action: Conceptual Development and the Catalytic Effect of Hope.

Individual behaviour change is needed for a sustainable future to mitigate climate change however extensive barriers to action, are documented. One way to motivate action is through emotional appeals: whilst emotional responses to climate change communications have been a repeated focus in the literature, there has been a far greater focus on negative, e.g., fear, rather than positive, e.g., hope, emotions. The broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 2004) suggests that positive emotions can increase creativity and improve decision making but this theoretical approach has received little attention within environmental psychology to date. Two studies examine the idea of climate creativity, and whether the positive emotion of hope can inspire climate creativity as a means by which to promote environmental action and a sustainable future. Study 1 develops a new measure of climate creativity and establishes the validity of this measure. Study 2 uses a between participants experimental design, inspiring either hope or fear with a video and using a neutral control group for comparison. Data finds an increase in measures of self-reported creativity, climate creativity, and environmental problem-solving in the hope condition compared to the control. Findings provide support for the idea that feelings of hope can inspire creativity in sustainable behaviour, implying that positive emotions may be effective in inspiring action to overcome barriers. Promoting positive emotions and creativity may therefore be particularly effective for tackling difficult, harder to change behaviour • A new climate creativity concept is developed • A new measure of climate creativity is validated • Experimentally induced hope increases climate creativity • Climate creativity correlates positively with problem-solving