75 Making Connections (IntroPSYC and SDG 13): Climate Action

By Meghan E. Norris and Riley J.T. Bonar

Welcome to our unit on intelligence and decision making! Intelligence is a concept that has been around likely as long as psychology itself. The study of intelligence spans far beyond “smarts,” as you’ll learn about in this unit. In addition to different theories of intelligence, you will learn a lot about assessment. Intelligence can be measured in different ways, and indeed, some historical measures were biased and caused harm. It is our responsibility to learn about the pros and cons of different types of measurement to be accountable for outcomes associated with them. It is also our responsibility to learn about theories of intelligence to ensure they live up to the Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists (4th edition), which you learned about early in our course.

Judgement and Decision Making is an area of research in psychology that generally explores how we process information and our subsequent behavioural response to that information. You will learn that there are many everyday features in our environment that lead to us making decisions that are less than optimal.

This tendency for us to make decisions that are less than optimal relates closely to SDG 13: Climate Action. Climate change can happen because of human activities. Our decisions and behaviours have real-world consequences for our climate.

Did you know that Canada has the second-largest land mass and the longest coastline in the world? It’s also home to 20% of the world’s fresh water and 25% of its wetlands, providing habitat for approximately 80,000 species. Canada’s natural resources play a significant role in our economy, with industries like agriculture, forestry, mining, and fishing contributing about 7% of our GDP. Importantly, a healthy natural environment helps protect us every day. Wetlands absorb carbon and help manage excess rainfall, forests reduce erosion, and thriving ecosystems can help lessen the impacts of severe weather (Government of Canada, 2026). Accordingly, the Government of Canada has released Canada’s 2030 Nature Strategy: Halting and Reversing Biodiversity Loss in Canada.

The guiding vision for this strategy is “Nature is healthy, thriving, and sustaining and enriching the lives of current and future generations, and all Canadians have re-established their relationship with and are honouring their responsibilities to nature.” There are six pillars associated with the strategy:

• Recognizing, upholding, and implementing the rights of Indigenous Peoples and advancing reconciliation, as Indigenous Peoples are the original caretakers of the lands, waters, and ice.
• Ensuring a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach to create policy coherence and draw on the strengths of every segment of society to build and deliver the solutions we need.
• Supporting a resilient economy and improving efficiency and certainty, as our prosperity is inherently linked to a healthy environment.
• Empowering on-the-ground action by reflecting regional differences, supporting communities, and adopting flexible community-based approaches.
• Using the best available science and knowledge, incorporating new insights, sharing information, and giving equal weight to western science and Indigenous Knowledge.
• Applying integrated, holistic approaches to ensure our actions are inclusive and transparent.

In exploring Canada’s 2030 Nature Strategy, you will see the importance of recognizing, upholding, and implementing the rights of Indigenous Peoples. We invite you to explore the lands that you are situated on to learn about treaties and agreements that you may not know about.

If you are reading this from the Queen’s University campus and are looking to learn more about the land that we are on, we invite you to consider connecting with our Office of Indigenous Initiatives (OII) who host Walk Talks. As shared by the OII, “A Walk Talk (Akan, 1992) is a reflective, relational, and land-based learning experience rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Through guided engagement with place, participants are invited to deepen their connections to land, self, community, and learning.  Walk Talks create space for reflection, conversation, observation, and meaningful engagement with local lands and waters. Stories, teachings, medicines, and place-based knowledge may be shared depending on the season, location, group needs, guiding themes, and what is encountered along the way.”

We hope you see from these Making Connections units, and elsewhere in the course, that psychological science has an essential role in this work. If this is a topic of interest to you, we invite you to watch the optional below video from the American Psychological Association. In it, you will learn more about the role of Psychological Science as we work to stop, and cope with, climate change.

The science of decision making is important for climate, and many other contexts! If decision making is an area that you are excited about, check out the labs of Dr. David Hauser and Dr. Anita Tusche here at Queen’s! Dr. Hauser studies judgment and social cognition, namely how communication guides our inferences, preferences, and reasoning. His work investigates how seemingly innocuous words color evaluations, how metaphors guide understanding of abstract concepts like disease and health, and how common survey methods shape research conclusions.

Dr. Tusche studies the processes that drive variance in human decision-making across people, context and time. For example, she notes that in complex and constantly changing environments, we are faced with countless decisions and choice settings. Specialized neural codes for all possible types of scenarios seem inefficient. Her lab asks questions such as “What choice model accounts for commonalities and differences across choice domains (i.e. dietary vs. altruistic vs. investing behaviour)?” She also asks questions such as “how can we increase ‘good’ decisions that yield long-term benefits for the decision-maker and/or society at large (e.g. eat healthier, save for retirement, be kinder, consumer choices that are environmentally friendly)?”

References:

Canadian Psychological Association. (2017). Canadian code of ethics for psychologists (4th ed.). https://cpa.ca/docs/File/Ethics/CPA_Code_2017_4thEd.pdf

Clayton, S., Kumar, P., & Dodgen, D. (2023). IPCC and the role of psychological science in addressing climate change: American Psychological Association 2023.  [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrAIKNGgR_A

Government of Canada. (n.d.). Canada’s 2030 nature strategy: Halting and reversing biodiversity loss in Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/biodiversity/canada-2030-nature-strategy.html 

United Nations. (n.d.). Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/climate-change/

How to cite this using APA Style:

Norris, M. E., & Bonar, R. J. T. (2026). Making connections (IntroPSYC and SDG 13): Climate action. In PSYC 100: Principles of psychology. eCampusOntario. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/testbookje/chapter/making-connections-intropsyc-and-sdg-13-climate-action/