Future orientation promotes climate concern and mitigation

Abstract Climate change entails uncertainties in the timing and scale of future impacts, imposing challenges to decision-making with intertemporal trade-offs. When making intertemporal trade-offs, future impacts are often considered distant and discounted in present decision-making and policy design. The future, however, is not only temporally distant but also perceived in culturally and psychologically different ways. Based on national statistics and individual-level survey data, statistical analyses show that both national and individual differences in future orientation affect climate perception and mitigation. At the national level, countries with languages that grammatically highlight the future are associated with higher climate concern, lower carbon emissions and energy use, and more progress in climate mitigation. Individual-level evidence suggests that future orientation helps the public understand complicated climate issues, make more personal mitigation but not necessarily collective action or policy support. The findings indicate the important role that subjective future orientation plays in climate perception and decision-making. Both behavioral intervention and climate communication can be designed based on future orientation to better address climate change.