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The increasing impacts of climate change instigate the need for adaptation. However, most adaptation initiatives focus on actions by government or businesses, despite growing calls for communities on the frontline of climate risks to be involved in planning and selecting strategies. Here we appraise a pilot process using participatory systems mapping with citizens to identify (1) diverse threat vectors for local climate impacts and (2) context-relevant interventions to protect households and communities while (3) considering synergies and trade-offs with other socially desirable outcomes. We tested the pilot process in communities in the Lower Volta Basin in Ghana, the Assam region in India and Southern England. From participants’ perspectives, the process increased awareness of and preparedness for climate change impacts and raised essential learning points for upscaling citizen-led adaptation approaches. These include understanding multiple outcomes of interventions, barriers and enablers to implementation, and sensitivity of co-design to regional geography and socio-cultural context.

A safe and just operating space for socioecological systems is a powerful bridging concept in sustainability science. It integrates biophysical earth-system tipping points (ie, thresholds at which small changes can lead to amplifying effects) with social science considerations of distributional equity and justice. Often neglected, however, are the multiple feedback loops between self-identity and planetary boundaries. Environmental degradation can reduce self-identification with nature, leading to decreased pro-environmental behaviours and decreased cooperation with out-groups, further increasing the likelihood of transgressing planetary boundaries. This vicious cycle competes with a virtuous one, where improving environmental quality enhances the integration of nature into self-identity and improves health, thereby facilitating prosocial and pro-environmental behaviour. These behavioural changes can also cascade up to influence social and economic institutions. Given a possible minimum degree of individual self-care to maintain health and prosperity, there would seem to exist an analogous safe and just operating space for self-identity, for which system stewardship for planetary health is crucial.

Companies and related consumer behaviours contribute significantly to global carbon emissions. However, consumer behaviour is shifting, with the public now recognising the real and immediate impact of climate change. Many companies are aware and seemingly eager to align to consumer’s increasing environmental consciousness, yet there is a risk that some companies could be presenting themselves as environmentally friendly without implementing environmentally beneficial processes and products (i.e. greenwashing). Here, using longitudinal climate leadership, environmental messaging (Twitter) and stock price data, we explore how climate leadership (a relative climate change mitigation metric) and environmental messaging have changed for hundreds of UK companies. Using the environmental messaging, we also assess whether companies are simply greenwashing their true climate change performance. Finally, we explore how climate leadership and environmental messaging influence companies’ stock prices. We found that companies (on average) have increased their climate leadership (coef: 0.14, CI 0.12–0.16) and environmental messaging (coef: 0.35, CI 0.19–0.50) between 2010 and 2019. We also found an association where companies with more environmental messaging had a higher climate leadership (coef: 0.16, CI 0.07–0.26), suggesting messaging was proportionate to environmental performance, and so there was no clear pattern of using Twitter for greenwashing across UK companies. In fact, some companies may be under-advertising their pro-environmental performance. Finally, we found no evidence that climate leadership, environmental messaging or greenwashing impacts a company’s stock price.

Abstract: Government policies are key to combating climate change and biodiversity loss. Here, we examine whether environmental messages on Twitter by UK politicians can be used to predict the probability of politicians voting-in pro-environmental policy. Using historical Twitter data and voting records, we determine that the number of tweets by UK politicians regarding environmental subjects has increased over the last decade, although this is not consistent across all parties. The probability of voting environmentally has not increased, instead, voting trends are highly heterogeneous over time, varying by political party. This suggests that there is little association between politicians that promote environmental messages on social media and the odds of them voting-in environmental policy. However, in some cases, politicians do deviate from political party lines, and so we assessed whether politicians that posted more environmental messages were more likely to break party lines and vote-in environmental measures. We found evidence that, after accounting for party, politicians who tweet more frequently about environmental subjects are more likely to vote against party lines in favour of environmental measures. This work suggests that politicians’ that post more environmental messages are more likely to support pro-environmental policy, but this signal is low relative to the predominant driver—political party association. Article highlights:

Environmental tweeting by UK MPs has increased over the past decade but environmental voting has not.

Party lines account for much of the variation in environmental vote patterns.

Political association is a stronger predictor of vote intentions than whether an MP tweets about environmental issues.