Rethinking the Link between Psychology and Environmental Sustainable Development Goals

Since 2015 scholars are called to inform on how their research contributes to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by associating – branding - their publications with them. However, we still know little about how research in psychology intersects with the different SDGs. Only for social psychology has SDGs branding been studied. Results suggest environmental SDGs are underrepresented in social-psychological research, although it is known that social psychological approaches to environmental topics are well-established. To investigate this gap, and mapping environmental psychological research in general, we compiled the more typical keywords of the 7 environmental SDGs (6, 7, 11-15). Then, we employed them for searching Scopus for constructing a corpus of papers (n= 16,568) across psychological disciplines, irrespective of their SDG branding. Then keywords cooccurrence was analysed with WOSviewer to extract thematic clusters. Climate change and consumer behaviour emerged as closely linked in the central cluster for environmental studies in psychology, followed by sustainable energy and mental health, including here eco-anxiety. This suggests an overrepresentation of the individual-level of analysis. The clusters linking studies tackling more social levels - addressing urban and community development and health - moreover intersect poorly with the first, suggesting they are treated separately. Moreover, typical political psychological topics regarding environmental issues -e.g., collective action, environmental justice- are highly underrepresented, and process-oriented approaches are too. In sum, in psychology, environmental studies express a focus on topic rather than process, and on individual-level approaches rather than on approaches cutting across all levels of analysis and their interactions.