Editing IPCC:AR6/SR15/Chapter-4 (section)

== 4.4.3.2 Strategies and policies to promote actions on climate change ==

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Policy can enable and strengthen motivation to act on climate change via top-down or bottom-up approaches, through informational campaigns, regulatory measures, financial (dis)incentives, and infrastructural and technological changes (Adger et al., 2003; Steg and Vlek, 2009; Henstra, 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r1128|1128]]</sup> .

Adaptation efforts tend to focus on infrastructural and technological solutions (Ford and King, 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r1129|1129]]</sup> with lower emphasis on socio-cognitive and finance aspects of adaptation. For example, flooding policies in cities focus on infrastructure projects and regulation such as building codes, and hardly target individual or household behaviour (Araos et al., 2016b; Georgeson et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r1130|1130]]</sup> .

Current mitigation policies emphasize infrastructural and technology development, regulation, financial incentives and information provision (Mundaca and Markandya, 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r1131|1131]]</sup> that can create conditions enabling climate action, but target only some of the many factors influencing climate actions (see Section 4.4.5.1). They fall short of their true potential if their social and psychological implications are overlooked (Stern et al., 2016a) <sup>[[#fn:r1132|1132]]</sup> . For example, promising energy-saving or low-carbon technology may not be adopted or not be used as intended (Pritoni et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r1133|1133]]</sup> when people lack resources and trustworthy information (Stern, 2011; Balcombe et al., 2013) <sup>[[#fn:r1134|1134]]</sup> .

Financial incentives or feedback on financial savings can encourage climate action (Santos, 2008; Bolderdijk et al., 2011; Maki et al., 2016) <sup>[[#fn:r1135|1135]]</sup> (see Box 4.5), but are not always effective (Delmas et al., 2013) <sup>[[#fn:r1136|1136]]</sup> and can be less effective than social rewards (Handgraaf et al., 2013) <sup>[[#fn:r1137|1137]]</sup> or emphasising benefits for people and the environment (Bolderdijk et al., 2013b; Asensio and Delmas, 2015; Schwartz et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r1138|1138]]</sup> . The latter can happen when financial incentives reduce a focus on environmental considerations and weaken intrinsic motivation to engage in climate action (Evans et al., 2012; Agrawal et al., 2015; Schwartz et al., 2015) <sup>[[#fn:r1139|1139]]</sup> . In addition, pursuing small financial gains is perceived to be less worth the effort than pursuing equivalent CO <sub>2</sub> emission reductions (Bolderdijk et al., 2013b; Dogan et al., 2014) <sup>[[#fn:r1140|1140]]</sup> . Also, people may not respond to financial incentives (e.g., to improve energy efficiency) because they do not trust the organization sponsoring incentive programmes (Mundaca, 2007) <sup>[[#fn:r1141|1141]]</sup> or when it takes too much effort to receive the incentive (Stern et al., 2016a) <sup>[[#fn:r1142|1142]]</sup> .

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