SustainFuture · Cooperating with the future: Children's sustainable behaviour in resource dilemmas

The world faces an environmental and climate crisis and a global transformation towards sustainable resource use is urgently needed. Cooperation is crucial for addressing this crisis and overcoming short-term self-interests for long-term collective benefits. While sustainable behaviour has been widely examined in adults, studies on children’s sustainable behaviour are still scarce. Understanding how children’s sustainable and cooperative behaviour develops and what factors foster or impede it, is urgently needed. Today’s children will be uniquely affected by the escalating environmental crises and will also grow into the future citizens who will have to take responsible actions to mitigate them. The aim of this project is to investigate children’s cooperative and sustainable behaviours when their actions affect others in the future, using an experimental, game-based approach (resource dilemma games). And, as the current challenges are global in nature, it is essential that we study how children’s cooperation develops in different parts of the world. To this end, this project will include 5-to-8-year-old children from Pune (India) and Plymouth (United Kingdom). The project integrates insights from developmental and cognitive psychology, behavioural sciences, experimental economics, and environmental sciences. It will make an important contribution to diversifying the evidence base of the psychological and behavioural sciences, advance our understanding of sustainable behaviour and cooperation in childhood and open avenues for future research with diverse communities. Insights derived from my game-based, experimental approach will be uniquely suited for translation into applied settings and of interest to educators and policymakers, helping to prepare children to act responsibly in an uncertain future.