The study, led by Tobias Brosch, director of the Consumer Decision and Sustainable Behavior Lab at UNIGE’s Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences and the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, together with postdoctoral researcher Mario Herberz, is published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Rather than running a single experiment, the team conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis, a statistical technique that pools the results of many independent studies to reveal patterns no individual investigation could detect on its own. The researchers analysed 71 studies examining the impact of specific climate communication strategies, drawing on data from a total of 216,000 participants in Switzerland and abroad. This scale makes it the first large-scale synthesis of its kind in the domain of climate action messaging.

The scope of the analysis was deliberately broad. The 71 studies encompassed 15 distinct communication approaches, spanning the full spectrum of what campaigners currently deploy in the field. At one end sat purely informational strategies, which aim to fill knowledge gaps by presenting scientific facts about global warming, its causes and its consequences. At the other end sat emotionally oriented approaches, including storytelling and messages designed to evoke a sense of wonder or awe at the beauty of nature. In between lay strategies grounded in the principle of bounded rationality, a concept from behavioural economics which holds that human decision-making is limited by attention, time and cognitive capacity. These approaches do not try to persuade through argument but instead facilitate choices by highlighting specific, personally relevant aspects of climate change, such as its consequences for health or household finances.

The headline finding is, in one sense, reassuring for communicators: almost all of these strategies are likely to have a positive effect. According to Brosch, the synthesis shows that the vast majority of approaches improve people’s intentions and behaviours, as well as their support for climate policies. In other words, the question facing campaign designers is rarely whether a given message will help, but how much it will help. Given that the studies reviewed mainly measured the effects of messages to which people were exposed only once, the authors note that this is particularly encouraging, since repeated exposure, as occurs in sustained campaigns, can be expected to strengthen the impact of effective messages over time.

But the meta-analysis also revealed a clear hierarchy among the strategies, and this is where the practical implications become sharpest. Campaigns that evoke a strong emotional response were found to be significantly more effective than those that simply present facts and scientific evidence. Two emotional routes stood out in particular. The first is storytelling, in which narratives carry the audience through experiences rather than at them, allowing listeners to feel the stakes of climate change rather than merely read about them. The second is the evocation of wonder or awe at the beauty of nature, an emotion that appears to connect people to the very thing at stake in climate action: landscapes, ecosystems and species worth preserving.

A third, closely related family of high-performing messages draws on moral, ethical or even religious considerations. These framings highlight humanity’s connection to something greater than itself, a natural world that people have a responsibility to preserve for future generations and for its own sake. The effectiveness of such messages suggests that climate communication resonates most deeply when it engages the values and identities that people already hold, rather than attempting to construct persuasion from raw data. Facts, in this picture, are not useless; they are simply insufficient on their own to overcome the psychological distance that many people feel from a global, slow-moving problem.

One strategy family, however, failed to deliver. Messages built on individual and collective responsibility, exemplified by slogans such as ‘success depends largely on you’, showed little or no effect on intentions, behaviour or policy support. Worse, the researchers note that such messages may even foster reactance, the well-documented psychological phenomenon in which people respond to perceived pressure or blame by digging in their heels and doing the opposite of what is asked. Guilt-oriented appeals that place the entire burden of a planetary problem on a single person’s shoulders appear, at least in the aggregated evidence, to be a dead end for campaigners.

The synthesis also yielded a more modest but actionable insight: messages are more effective when they include images. Visual content, whether photographs of melting ice or sweeping natural landscapes, appears to amplify the persuasive power of accompanying text. This aligns with the broader emotional findings, since imagery is a particularly direct route to affective response. For public authorities and organisations with limited communication budgets, the combination of narrative, emotional framing and strong visuals represents the most evidence-backed recipe currently available.

The timing of these findings matters. As Brosch observes, the scientific evidence on climate change is now well established, and the central challenge is no longer generating knowledge but turning knowledge into action. The gap between what people know and what they do, sometimes called the knowledge-action gap, has persisted for decades despite ever-clearer reports from the scientific community. The Geneva results suggest that closing this gap requires communicators to stop treating audiences as information deficits to be filled and start treating them as emotional, moral and social beings whose behaviour is shaped by feelings, stories and values. At a time when the stakes of climate inaction continue to rise, the researchers conclude that there is considerable scope to improve climate communication, and the evidence now points clearly toward where that improvement should begin: with the heart as much as the head.

Subject of Research: The effectiveness of different communication strategies in promoting climate action

Article Title: To promote climate action, emotion matters more than information

Article References: To promote climate action, emotion matters more than information. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: climate change, climate communication, meta-analysis, emotion, storytelling, behavior change, environmental psychology, University of Geneva, bounded rationality, public campaigns, knowledge-action gap, policy support

The research, published in Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, responds to a problem that has frustrated policymakers across the developing world. Biofuel supply chains in emerging economies are constrained by fragmented governance, technological gaps, and competing sustainability priorities, and interventions aimed at one part of the chain often fail because deeper, upstream factors remain untouched. The team, led by Ilyas Masudin together with Rangga Primadasa and Dian Palupi Restuputri, set out to bring analytical order to this complexity by combining three established modeling techniques into a single, evidence-based pipeline for decision-makers.

The first technique, Interpretive Structural Modeling, or ISM, is a method for converting expert judgment about how factors influence each other into a hierarchical map. The researchers assembled a six-member multidisciplinary panel of domain experts who worked through structured questionnaires and Delphi-style consultations, assessing whether each of the seventeen decarbonization factors shaped, or was shaped by, every other factor. From these pairwise judgments, the team constructed a reachability matrix and distilled it into a layered structural model showing which factors sit at the base of the system, exerting influence from below, and which sit at the top, shaped by everything beneath them.

Complementing the structural model, the team applied MICMAC analysis, whose French name translates as cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification. This technique computes two scores for every factor: driving power, which measures how strongly a factor influences the rest of the system, and dependence power, which measures how strongly the factor is itself influenced. Plotting these scores sorts the seventeen factors into four families. Autonomous factors are relatively isolated; dependent factors are passive consequences of the system; linkage factors are both influential and unstable, amplifying whatever happens around them; and independent factors are the true engines of change, shaping the system while remaining largely beyond its control.

The structural analysis produced an unambiguous verdict about where the system’s leverage lies. Regulatory and policy support, designated CF7 in the study, and carbon pricing, designated CF8, each exhibited the maximum possible driving power of 17, meaning they influence every other factor in the framework while depending on none. In structural terms, these governance instruments are the roots of the entire decarbonization effort: strengthen them, and the effects cascade upward through technology adoption, financing, feedstock logistics, and stakeholder engagement. This finding aligns with a substantial body of literature showing that biofuel industries flourish or wither largely according to the policy environment that surrounds them.

Yet the study’s most consequential result emerged from its third component, Fuzzy VIKOR, a multi-criteria optimization technique that ranks alternatives by their closeness to an ideal compromise solution while explicitly handling the uncertainty inherent in human expert judgment. By encoding expert assessments as fuzzy numbers rather than crisp values, the method acknowledges that real-world evaluations are rarely precise. When the seventeen factors were ranked through this compromise-based lens, the ordering diverged sharply from the structural hierarchy. Technological maturity, CF13, emerged as the top-ranked priority with a VIKOR index Q of 0.000, the best possible compromise score, followed jointly by production process energy efficiency, CF4, and regulatory and policy support, CF7, each at Q equal to 0.274.

This divergence between the two lenses is the study’s central originality claim, and the authors argue it is a perspective absent from prior biofuel supply chain research. The structural analysis says that policy and carbon pricing are the systemic drivers whose improvement unlocks everything else. The compromise ranking says that technological maturity is the urgent binding constraint, the factor whose current inadequacy most severely holds back overall decarbonization performance relative to an ideal state. Both statements are true at once, and neither alone is sufficient. A government that pours resources into carbon pricing while the underlying conversion technologies remain immature may find its policies have nothing to grip; conversely, perfecting technologies without driving policy change leaves the system’s root causes untouched.

For emerging economies, the practical implications are considerable. The framework offers what the authors describe as a transparent, actionable tool to sequence interventions, optimize resource allocation under uncertainty, and foster stakeholder consensus on decarbonization roadmaps. Because the ISM layer reveals interdependencies, planners can identify which investments will propagate benefits through the chain; because the MICMAC layer classifies factors by driving and dependence power, planners can distinguish levers from symptoms; and because the Fuzzy VIKOR layer produces a compromise ranking robust to judgment uncertainty, planners can defend their sequencing choices to ministries, investors, and communities. The synthesis also demonstrates that effective decarbonization must concurrently address technological, governance, and socio-economic linkages to align emission reductions with broader circular economy and sustainability goals.

The study arrives amid intensifying global scrutiny of biofuels’ climate credentials. Life cycle assessments have shown that the carbon arithmetic of liquid biofuels depends heavily on feedstock choices, land use change, and production energy, while food-feed-fuel competition remains a persistent concern in biomass-constrained regions. In this context, a framework that helps emerging economies prioritize the factors that genuinely determine supply chain emissions, rather than spreading scarce resources across every plausible intervention, addresses a real and growing need. The authors report that the expert panel’s judgments were anonymized and obtained with verbal informed consent, and that no funding was received for the work.

The researchers acknowledge the inherent limits of expert-based modeling, and the framework is designed to be rerun as conditions evolve: as technologies mature, as carbon markets deepen, and as governance capacity strengthens, the interdependency structure and the compromise rankings can be recomputed to reflect the new reality. Data from the study will be made available on request. For now, the message for decision-makers in biofuel-producing developing nations is twofold: respect the structural roots of the system in policy and carbon pricing, but recognize that the most urgent bottleneck today is the maturity of the technologies themselves, and plan accordingly.

Subject of Research: A hybrid multi-criteria decision-making framework for prioritizing decarbonization factors in biofuel supply chains in emerging economies

Article Title: A hybrid ISM-MICMAC-Fuzzy VIKOR framework for decarbonizing biofuel supply chains in emerging economies

Article References: Masudin, I., Primadasa, R., & Restuputri, D. P. (2026). A hybrid ISM-MICMAC-Fuzzy VIKOR framework for decarbonizing biofuel supply chains in emerging economies. Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, 28(10), Article 250. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-026-03601-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10098-026-03601-w

Keywords: biofuel supply chain, decarbonization, ISM, MICMAC, Fuzzy VIKOR, multi-criteria decision-making, emerging economies, technological maturity, carbon pricing, policy support, circular economy, sustainable energy