
Christine Wamsler
Professor, Docent, appointed Excellent Teaching Practitioner (ETP)

Fostering collective climate action and leadership : Insights from a pilot experiment involving mindfulness and compassion
Author
Summary, in English
Recent research suggests that mindfulness, compassion, and self-compassion relate to inner transformative qualities/capacities and intermediary factors that can support increased pro-environmental behavior and attitudes across individual, collective, organizational, and system levels. However, current insights focus on the individual level, are restricted to certain sustainability fields, and wider experimental evidence is scarce and contradictory. Our pilot study addresses this gap and tests the aforementioned proposition in the context of an intervention: an EU Climate Leadership Program for high-level decision-makers. The intervention was found to have significant effects on transformative qualities/capacities, intermediary factors, and pro-environmental behaviors and engagement across all levels. The picture is, however, more complex for pro-environmental attitudes. With due limitations (e.g., small sample size), this preliminary evidence confirms the feasibility and potential of mindfulness- and compassion-based interventions to foster inner-outer transformation for sustainability and climate action. Aspects that should be taken into account in larger confirmatory trials are discussed.
Department/s
- The International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics
- LUCSUS (Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies)
- LU Profile Area: Nature-based future solutions
Publishing year
2023-03-17
Language
English
Publication/Series
iScience
Volume
26
Issue
3
Document type
Journal article
Publisher
Elsevier
Topic
- Applied Psychology
Keywords
- Global change
- Interdisciplinary application studies
- Nature conservation
- Psychology
Status
Published
Project
- Agents of Change - Mind, cognitive bias and decision-making in a context of social and climate change
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISSN: 2589-0042