Barriers to Climate Activism: The Vital Role of Social Identification

What predicts engagement in climate action? This is a vital question for climate social movements to answer. Using a nationally representative survey of UK participants (n=1100), we investigated what predicts both actual behavioural engagement with Extinction Rebellion (XR), a large-scale environmental movement, along with reported barriers to climate activism. Based on past behavioural engagement, we propose a new typology of activist personas, finding that most people are disengaged (87%) or “clicktivists” (10%), engaging primarily in virtual activism. However 32% of our sample did donate their time to XR when asked, a version of collective climate action. We find that social identification with XR predicts behavioural engagement better than partisanship, demographics, or climate attitudes, and in turn, we explore the predictors of social identification. We also surveyed the most common barriers for not participating in climate action (namely, a lack of time), and supplement our quantitative findings with qualitative data.