Focus on environmental psychology: IPB members present their research at ICEP 2025

From June 15 to 18, 2025, the International Conference on Environmental Psychology (ICEP) will take place in Vilnius - one of the central conferences in the field of environmental psychology. The Institute for Planetary Health Behavior (IPB) will be represented by a strong team this year, with a total of eleven researchers traveling to Lithuania to present their current studies on the psychological foundations of environmentally relevant behaviour.

In several presentations, they will address topics such as the effect of communication strategies, the importance of a sense of climate justice and the often-discussed intention-behavior gap in the context of climate action. The program includes the following contributions by members of the Institute:

• Kevin Tiede shows that people systematically overestimate how many people are actually committed to climate action.
• Mattis Geiger examines the predictive power of self-reported willingness to act for actual political commitment to more climate protection.
• Philipp Sprengholz sheds light on how targeted communication can use anger productively for climate protection behavior.

We are particularly pleased that several young researchers from the PACE project will be presenting their research findings at the conference:

• In her study, Lena Lehrer examines the influence of future thinking on visions of the future and willingness to act against the climate crisis.
• In her intervention studies, Hellen Temme examines the acceptance of political measures in the context of nutrition.
• Lisa Marie Hempel presents a new scale for the perception of climate justice and anchors it theoretically.

Furthermore, Dominik Daube leads an international symposium on heat and planetary health. Psychological, social, and political responses to extreme heat events will be discussed. In this symposium, Parichehr Shamsrizi will present current analyses from the PACE and HEATCOM projects on the perception of heat risks and protective behavior. Robert Bruckmann examines how weather dynamics are related to the perception of heat warnings.

Participation in ICEP 2025 underlines the Institute's commitment to making socially relevant research not only visible but also effective, in exchange with the international expert community and with a view to concrete action in climate protection.