Environmental motivation's relevance to CO2 emissions

Environmental motivation’s relevance to people’s CO 2 emissions has been challenged repeatedly. We argue that the relevance of environmental motivation to people’s emissions is often dramatically underrated due to an unrefined understanding of how motivation operates. Motivation affects emissions indirectly by offsetting the additional costs people incur for making sustainable travel decisions and by promoting their persistence in sustainable travel. Using GPS-tracked travel data collected in November 2024 from N = 231 German individuals across J = 18,745 recorded journeys over 13 days, we corroborated that motivation matters most when the emissions-saving potential is greatest: for long-distance traveling and, thus, for people who do a lot of long-distance traveling. Quite unexpectedly, we found that the total distance people traveled (i.e., their travel performance) was largely unrelated to their motivation. This finding means that even environmentally motivated people do not necessarily refrain from traveling. Structurally discouraging the demand for long-distance traveling should therefore be a focus of effective policy, complemented by measures to reduce the behavioral costs associated with sustainable travel mode choices.