Abstract
<p>Climate action has a strong cooperative component: many mitigation choices carry no private payoff, yet collectively generate broad social benefits. Here, we propose a new paradigm for behavioral and educational climate interventions that targets the cooperative decision-making competencies underlying climate action, and test it in a field intervention among high-school students (n=762) and their parents (n=416), using a multi-method assessment of cooperation and climate-action outcomes. The intervention had a direct positive effect on adolescents’ donations to pro-environmental causes, measured with real monetary stakes, and increased hope and mitigation behavior among students in green-network schools. It also generated positive spillovers beyond climate: donations to poverty and health concerns rose across the full sample, and strategic peer cooperation increased among girls. One year later, spillovers on other social concerns and on hope in addressing the climatecrisis persisted. The impacts of the intervention further multiplied within households: parents of treated adolescents gained climate knowledge, and parents whose children attended green-network schools increased their own pro-environmental donations and mitigation behavior. Training cooperation for climate action can thus offer a durable pathway to greener, fairer lifestyles, with adolescents acting as agents of change within their communities.</p>