Seminar Dr. Marie Kogler "Anxiety-related responses to climate news and climate-relevant behavior"

29 november 2022 10:00 t/m 11:00 - Locatie: TU Delft TPM room I | Zet in mijn agenda

Insights to interdisciplinary research spanning climate communication to the window of opportunity in the transportation sector

A substantial proportion of climate news revolves around the phenomenon of climate change and its consequences such as global warming, glacier melt, ocean acidification, risks, monetary expenses, and other environmental and economical long-term effects. Referring to these forecasts, many media channels make great efforts to communicate the danger potential of climate change as well as the necessity of climate protection. This reporting is mainly based on the assumption that well-informed citizens make well-informed decisions and will thus act in favor of climate change mitigation. This common but drastic simplification that broadcasting threatening information about climate change automatically leads to more climate-friendly behavior has been repeatedly challenged across several disciplines and is the core topic of this talk. Potential socio-psychological effects of threat-related and solution-related - two inherently different communication styles - have yet to be enlightened. While threat-orientation refers to communication that focuses on fear-producing rhetoric, solution-orientation refers to multi-layered reporting, which includes instructive aspects and points out possibilities for action. In the first part of this talk, I will present some insights from an interdisciplinary research project on the complexity of the climate debate and correlated effects on sustainable behavior. In the second part of this talk, I will outline some recent insights from leisure and business travel in Austria. Studies on leisure and business travel shows great differences between pre-pandemic and pandemic times in travel activities, especially in regard to aviation. This is associated with a “window of opportunity” to curb future emissions from the transportation sector. However, it does not seem clear, at least in Austria, how and if these emission reductions can be sustained in the long term.

Marie Lisa Kogler (Kapeller) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Systems Science, Innovation and Sustainability Research at the University of Graz, Austria, where she received her PhD in Natural Sciences in 2020. Her previous education comprises a bachelor's degree (TU Vienna) and a master's degree in physics (Humboldt-University Berlin). In her research, Dr. Kogler is engaged in systems science and computational social science with a focus on environmental decision making. She has recently published on anxiety-driven decision-making processes associated with climate-friendly actions, the calculation of carbon footprints in the context of leisure travel, social contagion and network diffusion phenomena, and early warning signals of tipping points in system dynamics. She is strongly interested in formalization processes from descriptive models to mathematical/computational models and is engaged in text mining and topic modelling as well. In her current projects, she explores the media debate on climate change and climate change mitigation, effects of threat-oriented and solution-oriented information, pandemic-related changes in aviation, and the corresponding window of opportunity for mitigation of future emissions.

There is the possibility of discussing with Marie, who will visit us for the whole week. If you are interested in having a talk after her seminar or meet another time, please send an email to Geeske: G.Scholz@tudelft.nl