Research
A healthy natural environment (e.g., air, soil, forests, waterways, and ocean) is crucial for all life on earth including humans. Many of the most pressing environmental challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and plastic pollution are the direct product of human decisions and actions. Environmental psychology operates in an interdisciplinary context as an application area of psychology, exploring human perception, decision-making, and behaviour. Broadly speaking, environmental psychology focuses on how different environments affect how we think, feel and behave, as well as how our thoughts, feelings and behaviours affect the environment. We study the reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment, in which human behaviour influences environmental quality and sustainability, and vice versa.
Protecting the natural world and human quality of life, and preparing society for future challenges, are the central tasks of environmental psychology.
Today, the most influential global institutions explicitly state that the social and behavioural sciences must be involved in solving current and future environmental problems (e.g., European Commission, UN, IPCC). The Urban and Environmental Psychology group at Vienna are deeply involved in these processes at both national and international levels. In this way, the group hopes to integrate research, teaching and impact, for societal and planetary good.