Editorial: Adaptive frontiers in the anthropocene: human-environment dynamics in the face of climate change

The first paper investigates the frontier of the socio-cultural foundations of cooperation surrounding climate as a public good. In this experimental study on young Chinese participants, Pansini and Shi (2025) show that collectivist values support higher mitigation in climate-related social dilemmas, such as air pollution and reforestation. They enunciated that the collective values can further help resolve climate-related social dilemmas that are hard to address in individualistic settings. Their threshold public goods game reveals that groups embedded in collectivist value systems achieved substantially higher success rates in funding reforestation initiatives than did individualistic societies. Their findings show that climate responses, including both adaptation and mitigation, are not solely technical matters but are fundamentally shaped by cultural and behavioral factors. Social learning, shared civic norms, and prosocial preferences can move groups toward cooperative action even when outcomes are uncertain.A second adaptive frontier emerges within organizations operating in climate-affected settings.