Project breakdown

• Bilateral project funded by FWF (Austria) and Aris (Slovenia)
• Joint research by University of Graz and University of Primorska
• Duration 2025-2028
• Investigation of decision making with long time horizons and large impacts, with a focus on house builders and forest owners 

Project details

Successful climate change mitigation and adaptation requires long-term decision making that prioritises value-creation in the future over value-creation in the present. However, predominant models of human decision making often focus on the immediate and near future impacts of decisions, and humans tend to heavily discount the temporally distant consequences. This presents a significant challenge for climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, which require immediate action (investments, decisions, choices) that pay off in the long run.

However, certain social roles require individuals to apply a different logic and think and act under consideration of long-time horizons. For instance, private forest owners and private home owners. Forests take time to grow, and decisions need to be made in the present, that leads to economic value creation in the future. Similarly, current and future private home owners have to make decisions that guarantee their building project remains robust over a longer timeframe, without the loss of value.

The aim of this project is to gain a better understanding of how long-term mitigation and adaptation decisions are made (deliberately or not) and which factors impact such decisions. Private forest owners and private home owners are confronted with long-term decisions and face new challenges in the light of climate change. Forests mitigate climate change by storing carbon, regulating extreme weather events, and halting land degradation. Moreover, replacing fossil-based material and energy flows by wood-based alternatives can potentially have significant mitigation benefits. Unfortunately, climate change also poses a growing threat to European forests as evidenced by the increasing frequency and severity of extended periods of drought, storms, and other natural disturbances over an increasingly larger scale. Similarly, home owners often consider measures to lower emissions of the building construction sector. Regarding the aspect of adaptation, private home owners need to protect their homes against extreme weather events such as heatwaves or heavy rainfall to strengthen resilience.

This project will identify barriers and drivers of long-term decision-making and determine how to foster long-term mitigation and adaptation decisions. A mixed method approach will be used to collect both qualitative (interviews, focus groups) and quantitative social science data (surveys), in addition to using tools from environmental sciences, such as life cycle assessment.

One key deliverable of the project is a decision-making model to better understand and guide long-term high-impact decisions that are needed to strengthen climate change mitigation and adaptation of current and future forest and home owners. To that end, we will investigate decisions with the highest mitigation and adaptation potential, the synergies and trade-offs between them and the decision factors that are essential for long-term decision making.

Project management, communication, and dissemination activities will be carried out throughout the entire duration of the project assuring a effective collaboration between partners. New scientific ideas will be developed based on the results, which will be presented at conferences and published in scientific journals. Collected data and methods will be openly shared in data sharing repositories. Along these lines, the project will help advance the understanding of long-term decision-making in cognitive, and social psychology, and to develop new research directions in climate and environmental psychology and sociology.

Project outcomes

The project started in June 2025. We will post findings and outcomes here as they emerge.