The United Nations 2030 Agenda specifically calls for changes in unsustainable consumption and production patterns, yet turning environmental knowledge into sustained action remains one of the field's most stubborn problems. Extended reality, the umbrella term covering virtual, augmented and mixed reality, offers a distinctive opportunity here, because immersive environments can make otherwise distant, abstract or inaccessible environmental conditions experientially tangible. That promise, however, comes with an important caveat drawn from the recent literature.

Reviews cited by the editors suggest that extended reality is a promising but still developing approach for sustainability-oriented behavioral change, and they highlight uncertainty about which intervention characteristics and psychological mechanisms lead to durable effects. More striking still, a recent systematic review with meta-analysis and a set of preregistered meta-analyses indicate that immersive media can lower psychological distance to environmental risks, but that reductions in psychological distance do not consistently translate into downstream pro-environmental engagement. In other words, making climate change feel close and vivid does not automatically make people act differently once the headset comes off.

This distinction between immediate experiential responses and sustained behavior forms the organizing principle of the editorial. The seven contributions differ considerably in how directly they address the central question of whether and how virtual and extended reality can support sustainable environmental behavior, so the editors group them by relevance and note the type of outcome each examines, ranging from physiological and affective responses through perceptions, attitudes and other psychological constructs to behavioral intentions and, in principle, observed real-world behavior. That last category, observed behavior, turns out to be empty across the entire collection.

Two contributions engage most directly with environmental sustainability. Chen and Chen examine immersive experience scene quality in digitally mediated tourism settings and trace psychological pathways through ecological presence, awe, psychological ownership and self-efficacy to support for environmental resilience. The editors note that the outcome here is attitudinal, stated support rather than observed behavior, but it is the closest contribution to the focal question of the Research Topic.

Dossena and colleagues review 24 publications on extended reality applications for the circular economy, distinguishing between public- and industry-oriented applications and pointing out underexplored areas. As a scoping review, it maps where the technology is being applied in this domain rather than testing its behavioral effects, which means it can identify gaps but cannot establish impact. A further pair of studies uses virtual reality to examine how people respond to environments, without measuring sustainability-related intentions or behavior at all.

Zhu and colleagues combine participatory preference refinement with virtual reality to study how spatial features affect older adults' short-term psychophysiological and affective responses, demonstrating how user-informed virtual experimentation can link environmental design to measurable responses. Phillips and Farrow pair immersive virtual reality with continuous biometric sensing to assess public perception of urban biodiversity, illustrating the value of temporally resolved physiological data alongside post-experience evaluations. Both studies are relevant to environmental design and to how people experience urban nature, but their endpoints are physiological, affective and perceptual rather than behavioral.

The remaining three contributions relate to the topic less directly, either because they mainly advance virtual reality methods or because their outcomes are not environmental. Parra Vargas and Alcañiz report an exploratory feasibility study on the automated assessment of communication skills in virtual reality, showing how artificial intelligence-supported measurement can extend the analytical capacity of immersive environments; the editors classify its relevance as methodological. Ou and colleagues show that immersive virtual reality experience mediates the relationship between cultural familiarity and cultural dissemination intention, pointing to the potential of immersive experience for cross-cultural understanding, though the outcome is cultural rather than environmental.

A second study by Chen and Chen explores psychological mechanisms and happiness generation in AI-enabled neighborhoods, discussing how reliability, usefulness, participation and digital engagement shape residents' experience. Virtual reality is not the technology under study there, and its bearing on sustainable environmental practice is indirect, mainly through implications for community practices and for virtual-reality-enabled interventions. Within these limits, the editors identify three modest collective advances.

First, several contributions show how designed and adaptable virtual environments can be used to study specific experiential processes in applied settings, such as age-friendly spatial design and urban biodiversity, building on a long tradition of interactive experimental virtual reality rather than marking a new direction for the field. Second, some studies complement self-report questionnaires with physiological sensing, participatory data or automated assessment, although other contributions still rely substantially or exclusively on questionnaire-based measures. Third, the collection spans a wide range of application areas, including age-friendly design, urban biodiversity, neighborhoods, cultural engagement, tourism and the circular economy.

This breadth matters, the editors argue, because sustainability behavior is context-dependent and cannot be explained by immersion alone; the findings are consistent with treating virtual and extended reality as socio-technical research and intervention platforms in which environmental stimuli interact with psychological, physiological, social and contextual mechanisms. The same breadth is also the collection's principal limitation. The contributions vary in whether virtual or extended reality is the intervention under investigation, a research tool, or neither; in whether environmental sustainability is the outcome at all; in whether the measured endpoint is physiology, affect, perception, attitudes, other psychological constructs or behavioral intention; in design, which ranges across experimental, observational and mixed-methods studies, a methodological feasibility study and a scoping review; and in time horizon, with most outcomes captured immediately or in the short term rather than longitudinally.

This heterogeneity, the editors conclude, limits the strength of any unified conclusion about the role of virtual reality in sustainable environmental behavior, and the findings are best read as complementary contributions to an emerging field rather than as cumulative evidence of behavioral change. Looking forward, the editors lay out a three-part research agenda. Longitudinal and field-based designs should explore whether immersive experiences yield measurable and durable changes in consumption, conservation, mobility, recycling or other environmental practices.

Researchers could examine adaptive virtual reality systems that draw on biometric sensing, behavioral tracking or artificial intelligence to tailor experiences, testing whether such adaptation improves outcomes compared with simpler designs, with any measurement kept transparent and ethically governed. Finally, the field should build cross-cultural and inclusive frameworks that account for accessibility, digital inequality, privacy and contextual differences, and should assess the complete sustainability balance of virtual and extended reality interventions, weighing behavioral and environmental benefits against the demands these technologies place on hardware, computing, energy use and electronic waste. The editors also flag ongoing ethical considerations around privacy and security when virtual reality systems collect biometric and behavioral data, as well as cybersickness and mental health.

Progress on these fronts, they argue, would move the field beyond showing that virtual reality can generate compelling experiences, toward understanding when, for whom and under what circumstances immersive technologies produce meaningful and sustainable behavioral outcomes.

Subject of Research: The role of virtual and extended reality in promoting sustainable environmental behavior

Article Title: Editorial: The role of virtual reality in facilitating behavioral changes toward sustainable environmental practices

Article References: Siyal, A. W., & Elliott, K. (2026). Editorial: The role of virtual reality in facilitating behavioral changes toward sustainable environmental practices. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 7, 2019514. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2026.2019514

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frvir.2026.2019514

Keywords: virtual reality, extended reality, sustainable behavior, pro-environmental behavior, psychological distance, immersive technology, circular economy, urban biodiversity, behavioral change, environmental psychology, meta-analysis, research gaps