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A frequent suggestion to increase individuals' willingness to take action on climate change and to support relevant policies is to highlight its proximal consequences, that is, those that are close in space and time. But previous studies that have tested this proximizing approach have not revealed the expected positive effects on individual action and support for addressing climate change. We present three lines of psychological reasoning that provide compelling arguments as to why highlighting proximal impacts of climate change might not be as effective a way to increase individual mitigation and adaptation efforts as is often assumed. Our contextualization of the proximizing approach within established psychological research suggests that, depending on the particular theoretical perspective one takes on this issue, and on specific individual characteristics suggested by these perspectives, proximizing can bring about the intended positive effects, can have no (visible) effect or can even backfire. Thus, the effects of proximizing are much more complex than is commonly assumed. Revealing this complexity contributes to a refined theoretical understanding of the role that psychological distance plays in the context of climate change and opens up further avenues for future research and for interventions.

Research on public perceptions of climate change often shows that people, at least in Western countries, typically perceive climate change as a distant threat, as something that affects strangers, and as something that happens in remote times and places, rather than in the here and now^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7} (for an exception, see ref. 8). This perception of climate change is problematic because it implies little personal relevance — which, in turn, is problematic because an individual's perception of being personally at risk can be an important motivation to take action against the source of that risk^{9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14}.

Consistent with this analysis, it has repeatedly been suggested that highlighting the proximal consequences of climate change could be an important part of strategies to engage and mobilize the public around this issue^{3, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20}. Although the assumed psychological mechanism of proximizing is often not verbalized (see also ref. 21, where the term is used to describe a discursive strategy in which the speaker presents physically and temporally distant events as close and directly relevant to the addressee), the rationale behind proximizing climate change seems to be that this approach (a) decreases the psychological distance between the issue and individuals who could or should act^{17, 22}, and (b) makes the consequences of climate change easier to visualize^{4, 23} and more personally relevant^{24, 25}. Moreover, proximizing climate change is believed to increase (emotional) concern^{16, 22, 26, 27} and the feeling of being personally vulnerable^{23, 27}; ultimately, these processes are expected to enhance people's motivation to act^{3, 4, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28}. The idea of focusing on proximal climate change to increase engagement with the issue is also consistent with the general tendency to attach a lesser value to the same outcome if it is seen to be further away in time, which is known as temporal discounting^{29, 30}.

Despite the common sense appeal of proximizing³¹ and the frequent propositions to use this strategy to motivate action against climate change, relatively few studies have empirically explored its effect. Moreover, the findings from those studies that have studied proximizing are inconclusive. One line of research that is useful in evaluating its role is to focus on personal experiences of events that are related to climate change. Although climate change is by definition a statistical concept (the average weather over several decades³²) and therefore cannot be experienced directly³³, people may still experience extreme weather events and considerable change in their local environment. To illustrate, one study found that Britons who had recently experienced flooding (a weather-related phenomenon expected to occur more frequently in Britain because of climate change) perceived their local area to be more at risk from climate change, were more concerned about climate change impacts, had higher confidence in their ability to mitigate climate change and were more willing to reduce their energy use in order to mitigate climate change than those who had not recently experienced flooding²⁶. Although some studies have revealed similar patterns^{34, 35, 36}, other work indicates that experiencing the impacts of extreme weather events does not necessarily increase concern and the willingness to respond to climate change^{37, 38}.

The relationships between exposure to extreme weather events and the way people feel about climate change and possible response strategies become more consistent when an additional factor is taken into account: namely, how individuals interpret such 'climate signals'^{27, 39}. People who report having experienced changes or events in the natural environment that they think were caused by climate change are more likely to believe that climate change is relevant to their local area and themselves^{40, 41} than people who did not report such experiences. More specifically, experiencing phenomena attributed to climate change was associated with increased perceptions of personal and local risks from climate change^{40, 41, 42}, and higher levels of concern and worry about this threat^{40, 41}. Last but not least, people who felt that they had personally experienced climate change through weather-related events or changes were more likely to support mitigation^{40, 41} and adaptation⁴³ measures (for an overview, see ref. 27). These findings support the idea that bringing climate change psychologically closer can under certain circumstances have the expected motivational effects. However, the qualification above — that experiencing extreme weather events only increases levels of engagement with climate change when people attribute their experiences to climate change — highlights that additional psychological or ideological processes are at work that complicate the effects of such experiences^{40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47}.

A crucial question that follows from this analysis is to what extent researchers and practitioners can study the relationship between experiences with phenomena that people believe to be manifestations of climate change and people's readiness to engage with climate change. Many existing studies suffer from a range of methodological constraints simply because the researchers have had to capitalize, after the event, on unpredictable phenomena that have already occurred. As an alternative, some researchers have tried to induce risk-free experiences that are consistent with climate change predictions. For example, increasing the room temperature strengthens people's belief in climate change⁴⁸, and some studies suggest that the mere activation of heat-related associations has similar effects^{49, 50, 51}. To our knowledge, however, there is currently no evidence that these manipulations affect behaviour. More importantly, the finding that personal experiences have the most consistent positive effects when individuals attribute them to climate change^{40, 41, 42, 44} raises the question of how deep and enduring the positive effects of incidental bodily sensations and implicitly activated associations are.

An alternative way to bring climate change closer to people is to reduce the psychological distance that people perceive when they think about this issue. Support for this idea comes from a study that explored how people perceived climate change relative to several dimensions of psychological distance. Concern about climate change increased if people were more certain it was happening, expected it to show effects sooner, and thought it was affecting their local area and people similar to themselves²⁸. But the same study found a counter-intuitive relationship between reported psychological distance and people's motivation to act: people who thought of climate change as a distant threat were more motivated to act²⁸. Findings from experiments where only psychological distance is varied and everything else is held constant also fail to consistently reveal the expected positive effects of proximizing. Of the three experimental studies we are aware of, two directly compared the effects of relatively proximal and distant descriptions of climate change (texts describing regional versus national climate change trends²⁴; texts, maps and photographs illustrating potential flooding caused by sea-level rise either with reference to the UK city where the study was conducted or with reference to continental Europe⁵²). However, these studies did not find the expected positive effects of proximizing on increased individual support for addressing climate change^{24, 52}. A third study provided members of the general public with information posters describing either one broad global impact of climate change (sea levels rising) or a local impact specific to the area they lived in (one of the following three: forest fires, beetle infestation or rising sea levels). When climate change was described in proximal terms, it increased participants' willingness to address climate change relative to a control condition in which no information was provided²⁵. In contrast, people's engagement with climate change did not differ between the globally framed poster and the control condition. Because this study did not directly compare the proximal and distant frames, it is not possible to draw any conclusions about specific advantages of describing climate change in proximal terms relative to a more distant framing.

In sum, there is some evidence that people are more concerned about climate change and more willing to take action when they have experienced extreme weather-related events or changes, and when they perceive climate change as psychologically proximal. However, attempts to capitalize on these interrelations have so far not consistently revealed the hypothesized effects on people's readiness to engage with climate change. The missing effects of such proximizing may, at first glance, seem counter-intuitive theoretically, as well as disappointing practically. On closer inspection, however, it becomes obvious that there is more complexity to how people engage with climate change than is commonly assumed — as exemplified by the finding that the motivational effects of personal experiences are contingent on people attributing these to climate change, something that cannot be taken for granted.

The next sections delve deeper into this complexity by applying three theoretical perspectives to the idea of proximizing. We show that, depending on the particular theoretical perspective one takes on this issue, and on specific individual characteristics suggested by these perspectives, proximizing can bring about the intended positive effects, can have no (visible) effect or can even backfire. In short, in light of this complexity, it should be less surprising that proximizing fails to consistently translate into increased willingness to act on climate change and to support relevant policies.

The first theoretical perspective that can help us to understand why proximizing may not directly increase individuals' willingness to act on climate change is construal level theory⁵³. In contrast to the underlying rationale of the proximizing strategy, this perspective does not suggest that thinking about an object or event as proximal rather than distant necessarily increases personal relevance — provided that the event or decision projected into the distance will still somehow and sometime become relevant to the individual^{54, 55}. Instead, construal level theory argues that varying levels of psychological distance (for example, here versus far away; now versus in 10 years) influence how people represent objects and events mentally, and what information they consider when making decisions⁵³. Importantly, this does