‘Going the distance’? The effects of a new method of proximizing climate change on perceived distance, risk perception, emotional response, and engagement in climate change mitigation

Abstract ‘Proximizing climate change’ is a widely used strategy for promoting public engagement in environmental communication. However, experimental manipulations of psychological distance often fail to substantially reduce the perceived distance of climate change, and, do not systematically affect responses to this issue. In this study, we test the effectiveness of a new proximizing method that combines two strategies on a sample of French students ( N = 349). First, we communicated about the immediate (vs. distant) consequences of climate change. Then, participants were asked to relate these consequences to their own direct experiences to accentuate the level of distance induced (versus a no-accentuation condition). We found that presenting proximal events reduces the perceived distance of climate change, but only when proximity is accentuated. This combined method also leads to greater risk perception, stronger emotional response, and increased engagement in mitigation, as it influences the perceived distance. Our results suggest that proximizing climate change is a valuable communication strategy in environmental campaigns when psychological closeness to climate change is made relevant to individuals’ personal experience.