The role of trust for climate change mitigation and adaptation behaviour: A meta-analysis

Successful climate change mitigation and adaptation depend on the public's trust in experts. Gaining a deeper understanding of how trust in certain actors influences individuals' mitigation and adaptation behaviours is, therefore, key. We present results of a meta-analysis that examines the role of trust in institutions, scientists, industry, environmental groups and people in general, in relation to different climate-friendly behaviours. We further categorise behaviours into 'public' and 'private' behaviours and conduct meta-regressions to see whether these categories moderate overall effect sizes. Analysing 141 correlations from 51 studies (46 articles), we find that trust in scientists and trust in environmental groups strongly correlate with climate-friendly behaviours. Meta-regressions further show that trust in institutions is moderately correlated with public behaviours, but only weakly with private behaviours, while associations with trust in industry and general trust measures are weak. We discuss the implications of these findings for climate scientists and how experts can potentially increase trust levels to foster engagement in climate-friendly behaviours.