Handbook of Behavioral Economics and Climate Change

Abstract

The past three decades have witnessed an exponential increase in academic literature pertaining to the behavioural economics discipline (Mesa-Vázquez et al., 2021). This comes in the wake of increasing systematic evidence of the potential for behavioural economics—with its underpinnings in psychology—to significantly improve standard neoclassical economics models and predictions of human behaviour in varying economic contexts (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008; Thaler, 2015). In tandem, a similar revolutionary trend has been seen in climate change research, motivated by an increasingly urgent concern for self-preservation of current and future generations. Whilst the two fields are now well-established strands in academic literature, the extent and nature of recent advancements at the intersection of behavioural economics and climate change research are less clear. The Handbook of Behavioral Economics and Climate Change (Seo, 2022a) (the Handbook henceforth) is a timely edited collection of frontier research that attempts to fill this gap, confronting the complex relationship amongst anthropogenic climate change, climate policy and decision-making behaviours of economic agents.