Why Knowing about Climate Change Is Not Enough to Change: A Perspective Paper on the Factors Explaining the Environmental Knowledge-Action Gap

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The review manuscript is generally well written. The authors explore environmental knowledge-action gap, which has significant impact. However, the following needs to be addressed before publication.

(1)    The authors do not cover if knowledge-action gap is influenced by demographics. Does any of the literature cited in the manuscript looked at the influence of demographics on this knowledge-action gap? If yes, please discuss. If not, please mention your thoughts. For example, see table 3 and figure 5, in the following manuscript, where it can be seen that income level significant in terms of environmental perceptions.

Nagisetty, R. M., Autenrieth, D. A., Storey, S. R., Macgregor, W. B., Brooks, L. C. 2020.  Environmental Health Perceptions in a superfund community. Journal of Environmental Management. 261, 110151, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110151

(2)    The review does not cover the complexity in the experimental results they have cited. The review does not discuss the literature experimental results to support their arguments. The literature is just cited without mentioning (at least for the significant ones) that support authors proposed enhanced self-regulation. Please discuss the experimental results of the significant literature. 

(3)    Please any limitations from the literature review.

 

(4)    L35-37 “We conclude by calling for more research to be carried out on the effect of enhanced self-regulation, and of self- regulation training, on individual reaction to the climate crisis.” I would encourage authors to expand this and discuss what kind of  data need to be collected (experimental design) to move this field forward.

 

Some minor suggestion

L322 Close the parenthesis and end sentence.

 

Author Response

The review manuscript is generally well written. The authors explore environmental knowledge-action gap, which has significant impact. However, the following needs to be addressed before publication.

Thanks for your appreciation and for your comments, they really help us in increasing the quality of our manuscript.

 

(1)    The authors do not cover if knowledge-action gap is influenced by demographics. Does any of the literature cited in the manuscript looked at the influence of demographics on this knowledge-action gap? If yes, please discuss. If not, please mention your thoughts. For example, see table 3 and figure 5, in the following manuscript, where it can be seen that income level significant in terms of environmental perceptions.

Nagisetty, R. M., Autenrieth, D. A., Storey, S. R., Macgregor, W. B., Brooks, L. C. 2020.  Environmental Health Perceptions in a superfund community. Journal of Environmental Management. 261, 110151, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110151

Thank you for this relevant comment. Before answering to your questions, it is important to point out that this paper was intended as a perspective paper and not as a systematic review, as such our work did not aim to provide a comprehensive review of literature findings on the environmental knowledge-action gap but to share a perspective on potential determinants of the gap, that have not attracted (in our opinion) enough attention of researchers. We therefore apologize if we have used some words in the manuscript that might have misled your interpretation and have provided to change wording that might trick readers into expecting this work to be a review. To clarify our aim, we rewrote the final paragraph of the introduction (please see lines 70 - 92).

To answer the question regarding demographics, we did not find, specifically, papers discussing the role of demographics in explaining the environmental knowledge action gap, though several studies have pointed out a correlation between demographics and pro-environmental behaviour (Ambrosius & Gilderbloom, 2014; Dunlap & McCright, 2008; Hoffarth & Hodson, 2016; Luo and Zhao, 2019; Meloni et al, 2019; Panno et al, 2017; Scopelliti et al, 2022) and socio-demographics and environmental risk perception (Brenan et al., 2019; Cruz et al., 2022; Liu & Mu, 2016; Luo & Zhao, 2019; Macias et al., 2015; Slimak & Diek, 2006; Zhao & Luo, 2021). Whilst discussing the results of studies exploring the relationship between demographics and pro-environmental behaviour fell out of the scope of this perspective paper, we did take your suggestion into consideration and integrated information on the effects of demographics on climate risk perception and on how they may bias individual interpretation of climate information (please see lines 158 – 164).

 

(2)    The review does not cover the complexity in the experimental results they have cited. The review does not discuss the literature experimental results to support their arguments. The literature is just cited without mentioning (at least for the significant ones) that support authors proposed enhanced self-regulation. Please discuss the experimental results of the significant literature. 

Thank you for your comment. As discussed above, the aim of our perspective paper was to share a point of view on some important intra-individual determinants of the environmental knowledge-action gap (i.e., self-regulation abilities) that seem to have been under investigated, within the domain of environmental psychology, compared to factors like knowledge and motivation. The scope of our paper was not to review, in an exhaustive manner, the literature on the topic. As such, findings of studies on which our perspective is built on were discussed in a conversational way throughout the manuscript, but we did not carry out an extensive / in-depth analysis of the methodology mentioned. Nevertheless, in the fifth chapter (lines 307-397à , we mention multiple other studies suggesting that self-regulation abilities would contribute to explain individual differences in pro-environmental behaviour performance and therefore potentially explain discrepancy between environmental knowledge and attitudes with actual behaviour. Among them, you will find a systematic review we have carried out, which is in the last phase of revision for publication Journal of Environmental Psychology (Colombo et al., 2023).

 

(3)    Please any limitations from the literature review.

Many thanks for suggesting including a paragraph on limitations. As our work was meant as a perspective paper rather than a review, we did not consider introducing a separated paragraph for limitations. Nevertheless, considering your comment we realized that a discussion of the limitations of our perspective might provide a valuable contribution to the readers, thus we added a paragraph on this subject (lines 415 - 437).

 

(4)    L35-37 “We conclude by calling for more research to be carried out on the effect of enhanced self-regulation, and of self- regulation training, on individual reaction to the climate crisis.” I would encourage authors to expand this and discuss what kind of data need to be collected (experimental design) to move this field forward.

Thank you for this suggestion. We included a paragraph on this topic in the Conclusion (lines 438-455) 

 

Some minor suggestion

L322 Close the parenthesis and end sentence.

Done, thank you.

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review the manuscript titled “Why knowing about climate change is not enough to change: A perspective on the factors explaining the environmental knowledge-action gap ".  

  

The research was divided into an introduction as section 1. After that, the following sections are tittled: 2. Why environmental knowledge fails to explain pro-environmental engagement; 3. The (limited) role of motivation;  4. How automatic cognitive and affective factors interfere in the implementation of pro-environmental intentions; 5. The (enabling) role of dispositions and cognitive processes. Finally, conclusions are the last section.  

  

a. Definitely, there is a literature review effort in this study. However, there are not any hypotheses, data analysis or the contributions of this study are not found, so this study can be improved.  

  

b. Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), the Norm-Activation-Theory (NAM) and the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) are developed in this literature review. However, why does consumption theory are not included in this literature review?. At least, the value-behavior concept should be included as a pattern of individual behaviour that authors point out for pro-environmental intentions and behaviours at introduction section. From my point of view, this study can be improved by reviewing later cites from Gordon, R.; Dibb, S.; Magee, C.; Cooper, P.; Waitt, G. Empirically testing the concept of value-in-behavior and its relevance for social marketing. J. Bus. Res. 2018, 82, 56–67. 

c. Authors concluded that "calling for more research to be carried out on the effect of enhanced self-regulation, and of self-regulation training, on individual reaction to the climate crisis." However, recent references (later 2021 or pandemic changes as example of inflection point) are not included for pointing out this literature review as a fronteir of knowledge state,  so this study can be improved.

Author Response

Thank you for the opportunity to review the manuscript titled “Why knowing about climate change is not enough to change: A perspective on the factors explaining the environmental knowledge-action gap ".  

Thank you for your comments and thoughts on our manuscript, very appreciated.

 

The research was divided into an introduction as section 1. After that, the following sections are tittled: 2. Why environmental knowledge fails to explain pro-environmental engagement; 3. The (limited) role of motivation;  4. How automatic cognitive and affective factors interfere in the implementation of pro-environmental intentions; 5. The (enabling) role of dispositions and cognitive processes. Finally, conclusions are the last section.  

Definitely, there is a literature review effort in this study. However, there are not any hypotheses, data analysis or the contributions of this study are not found, so this study can be improved.  

Thank you for taking the time to review our work and for acknowledging our effort in providing an outlook on possible determinants of the so-called environmental knowledge-action gap by discussing scientific literature on the topic. However, our paper was intended as a perspective paper and not as a systematic review, and as such we did not follow the IMRaD framework for structuring our thoughts, as suggested by editorial guidelines on writing perspective papers (as an example please consider Sprinklers guidelines on the structure of perspective papers https://www.nature.com/documents/natrev-articleformatguide-perspective.pdf). Also, despite we carried out an intensive review of the literature about pro-environmental behaviour, which has shaped our perspective on the issue of the environmental knowledge-action gap, the work was intended to propose a new viewpoint and a new hypothesis on the origin of such issue, rather than to test our hypothesis through a literature review. We apologize if we have used some words in the text that might have misled your interpretation and have provided to change wording that might trick readers into expecting this work to be a review. To clarify our aim, we rewrote the final paragraph of the Introduction (please see, lines 70-92). Also, we have rewritten our Conclusion paragraph to clarify how we would like our perspective paper to inform future research to enhance the understanding of the environmental knowledge-action gap (please see, lines 448-455)

 

Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), the Norm-Activation-Theory (NAM) and the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) are developed in this literature review. However, why does consumption theory are not included in this literature review? At least, the value-behavior concept should be included as a pattern of individual behaviour that authors point out for pro-environmental intentions and behaviours at introduction section. From my point of view, this study can be improved by reviewing later cites from Gordon, R.; Dibb, S.; Magee, C.; Cooper, P.; Waitt, G. Empirically testing the concept of value-in-behavior and its relevance for social marketing. J. Bus. Res. 2018, 82, 56–67. 

Thank you for your suggestion. As discussed above, the aim of our perspective paper was to share a point of view on some important determinants of the environmental knowledge-action gap (i.e., self-regulation abilities) that seem to have been under investigated, within the domain of environmental psychology, compared to factors like knowledge and motivation. In doing so, we discussed the most widespread models used in environmental psychology to explain pro-environmental behaviours (see Steg & Nordlund, 2019, “Theories to explain environmental behaviour”), one emblematic of a rationalistic outlook of individual decision-making processes and the other two of a normative outlook, to point out how both approaches can be criticised for failing to explain the discrepancy between intentions and actual implementation of behaviours (see Bamberg, 2013, “Changing environmentally harmful behaviors: A stage model of self-regulated behavioral change” or  Nielsen, 2017, “From prediction to process: A self-regulation account of environmental behavior change”). Hence, when introducing the TPB, VBN and NAM our aim was not to provide an extensive review of existing models of pro-environmental behaviour but to point out that the most widespread explanations of the knowledge-action gap, used in the domain of environmental psychology, were failing to consider how cognitive and affective factors might stand in the way when it comes to implementing pro-environmental intentions. As discussed above, we have integrated a paragraph aimed at clarifying the intent of our paper in the Introduction (please see, lines 70-92).

Following your suggestion, we have reviewed the article and the relevant literature on the value-behaviour approach, and we have come to consider that the perspective of the value-behaviour approach discussed in the article you have cited does not provide a substantially differentiating perspective from that expressed in the TPB model mentioned in our paper. Specifically, we consider that the concept of value-behaviour (and in general of all expectancy-value frameworks) can be ascribed to the concept of attitude, i.e. ,the beliefs that individual form regarding the performance of a certain behaviour and be considered a spin off / extension of the TPB (see in this regard Kalafatis et al.,1999, “Green marketing and Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour: a cross-market examination” and O’Siochru et al., 2022, “Issues of validity: Exploring the link between values and behaviour”). This is why, although we consider that detailing the value-in-behaviour theory falls out of the scope of our paper, we have introduced the concept when discussing the predictive power of extended versions of the TPB model (please see, lines 220- 224).

 

Authors concluded that "calling for more research to be carried out on the effect of enhanced self-regulation, and of self-regulation training, on individual reaction to the climate crisis." However, recent references (later 2021 or pandemic changes as example of inflection point) are not included for pointing out this literature review as a fronteir of knowledge state, so this study can be improved.

Many thanks for this comment. As this is not a literature review, we do not aim to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the literature on the environmental knowledge-action gap but rather to provide a viewpoint, that seems less explored, on the role of top-down cognitive processes in explaining discrepancy between knowledge/attitudes and behaviour. On this specific topic that we introduce, most of the cited literature was written in the past 5 years. Also, in support of our viewpoint, and of our call for more research on the role of self-regulation processes in explaining the environmental knowledge-action gap, we also refer to a systematic review that we have recently conducted on the relationship between self-regulation processes and executive functions with pro-environmental behaviour, which is in final revision stage at Journal of Environmental Psychology.

Nevertheless, following your comment we also added a few extra recent references on the relationship between knowledge and PEB (Soares et al., 2021; Sampene et al., 2023), on the subjective nature of knowledge (Cruz et al., 2022, Nagisetty et al., 2020) and on the predictive power of the TPB (Shalender & Sharma, 2021; Elahi et al, 2022; Pascucci et al., 2022; Waris et al., 2022), the VBN (Walton & Jones, 2022; Bhavana et al., 2023), the NAM (Sampene et al., 2023) and the CADM (Al Zaidi et al., 2023) on PEB. All these references have been added in the text and in the reference list of the articles.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Editor,

Thank you for considering me as a reviewer for the article “Why knowing about climate change is not enough to change: A perspective on the factors explaining the environmental knowledge-action gap”. 

I found the subject interesting and topical, well-argued and with a very extensive and in-depth bibliography. 

In the initial summary and introduction, where the theoretical models referenced for the study are listed, the "Comprehensive-Action-Determination Model (CADM)" is not named, even it is then deepened and discussed (from line 226 onwards and in the bibliography) as a possible alternative or addition to the previously named models. 

It would be interesting to suggest what might be possible interventions aimed at increasing capacity among the population on the individual response to climate.

Even if the article is written in good English, at times it needs to improve clarity.

Suggested reference:

Pascucci, T., Cardella, G. M., Hernández-Sánchez, B. R., & García, J. C. S. (2022). Environmental sensitivity to form a sustainable entrepreneurial intention. Sustainability, 14(16), 10398. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141610398

Van Valkengoed, A.M., Steg, L. Meta-analyses of factors motivating climate change adaptation behaviour. Nature Clim Change 9, 158–163 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0371-y

I recommend that this paper be accepted after minor revision.

Good quality

Author Response

Dear Editor,

Thank you for considering me as a reviewer for the article “Why knowing about climate change is not enough to change: A perspective on the factors explaining the environmental knowledge-action gap”. 

I found the subject interesting and topical, well-argued and with a very extensive and in-depth bibliography. 

Thank you for your interest in our work and for your comments on our manuscript.

 

In the initial summary and introduction, where the theoretical models referenced for the study are listed, the "Comprehensive-Action-Determination Model (CADM)" is not named, even it is then deepened and discussed (from line 226 onwards and in the bibliography) as a possible alternative or addition to the previously named models. 

Thank you for this comment. We added a sentence in the Abstract to introduce the CADM (please see, lines 31 - 32).

 

It would be interesting to suggest what might be possible interventions aimed at increasing capacity among the population on the individual response to climate.

Thank you for your comment. We introduced a few sentences on this point in the Conclusion (please see, lines 449 - 452)

 

Even if the article is written in good English, at times it needs to improve clarity.

Thank you for this valuable suggestion. We have tried to simplify long and complex sentences across the manuscript and we asked a native English speaker to do a proofreading.

 

Suggested reference:

Pascucci, T., Cardella, G. M., Hernández-Sánchez, B. R., & García, J. C. S. (2022). Environmental sensitivity to form a sustainable entrepreneurial intention. Sustainability, 14(16), 10398. https://doi.org/10.3390/su141610398

Van Valkengoed, A.M., Steg, L. Meta-analyses of factors motivating climate change adaptation behaviour. Nature Clim Change 9, 158–163 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0371-y

 

Thank you for the suggested papers. We have found useful to integrate the findings of both studies in our manuscript when discussing the findings on the predictive power of extended forms of the TPB model (such as the model used in Pascucci et al., 2022) (please see, lines 215 - 224 ) and when discussing studies supporting the perspective that knowledge would be insufficient to drive pro-environmental behaviour (please see, lines 96-100).

 

I recommend that this paper be accepted after minor revision.

Your appreciation is very welcome.

Reviewer 4 Report

The article's results provide valuable insights into the factors influencing the environmental knowledge-action gap in the context of climate change. It delves into the role of cognitive, affective, and cultural factors in shaping individuals' environmental knowledge and motivation to act. Additionally, it highlights the limitations of current pro-environmental behavior models and emphasizes the significance of self-regulation abilities.

 

While the article offers a comprehensive analysis of these factors, it is important to note that it does not provide a definitive solution to closing the knowledge-action gap. Instead, it calls for further research to explore the impact of enhanced self-regulation and self-regulation training on individual responses to the climate crisis. Therefore, while the results contribute to a better understanding of the issue, they do not fully answer the question of how to bridge the gap between knowledge and action in the context of climate change.

Author Response

The article's results provide valuable insights into the factors influencing the environmental knowledge-action gap in the context of climate change. It delves into the role of cognitive, affective, and cultural factors in shaping individuals' environmental knowledge and motivation to act. Additionally, it highlights the limitations of current pro-environmental behavior models and emphasizes the significance of self-regulation abilities.

Thank you for your appreciation of our manuscript.

 

While the article offers a comprehensive analysis of these factors, it is important to note that it does not provide a definitive solution to closing the knowledge-action gap. Instead, it calls for further research to explore the impact of enhanced self-regulation and self-regulation training on individual responses to the climate crisis. Therefore, while the results contribute to a better understanding of the issue, they do not fully answer the question of how to bridge the gap between knowledge and action in the context of climate change.

Many thanks for this comment. We feel the need to point out that this paper was intended as a perspective paper and not as a systematic review, as such our work did not aim to provide a comprehensive review of literature findings on the environmental knowledge-action gap nor to identify a definitive solution to the issue. We aimed to propose a viewpoint built on the origin of this issue, built on our understanding of pro-environmental behaviour and of potential cognitive mechanisms that tend to be involved when there is a discrepancy between intentions and action (i.e., self-regulation abilities). As such, the solution we propose is to further explore through research (both correlational and experimental) the role of self-regulation processes in explaining the gap.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors addressed all my comments. thanks. 

Author Response

We sincerely appreciate your feedback and are pleased to hear that the revisions we made addressed all of your comments. Thank you once again for your valuable contributions.

Reviewer 2 Report

Congratulations for your manuscript

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, thank you for your feedback. We're glad to hear that our revisions met your expectations.