Intergenerational futurability and political imaginaries of climate solutions in young adults: a quantitative study

The climate crisis is one of the main existential threats that our planet is currently facing (Jurgensen, 2024). Not only do the extreme weather events associated with the climate crisis affect ecosystems, but they also lead to decreased social well-being and public health (Oladejo et al., 2023), higher numbers of displacements, increased conflict (Bohm et al., 2020), and poverty (WMO, 2024). As of now, humanity is locked into a scenario of at least 1.5 degrees of warming in the next decades (WMO, 2025b), making it deserving of the utmost interdisciplinary attention. Applying the interpretive lens of the Capitalocene (Moore, 2016), the eco-political psychology paradigm (Trott, 2025), and the climate justice approach (Sultana, 2022), current research uses quantitative methods to assess differences in cooperation levels and climate imaginaries of young people from high and low-income countries. Cooperation is measured using the Public Goods Games Paradigm, and the future-and-back treatment is used to manipulate futurability (Hara et al., 2019; Shahen et al., 2021). The results indicate high levels of cooperation across the sample, as well as potential usefulness of the future-and-back manipulation. A wide range of solutions is used, representing depoliticized, moderate, and radical imaginaries, with the general preference for the Degrowth approach in the current sample (Hickel, 2019). Overall, these findings instill some hope, considering the decades-long informational and psychological warfare by the Big Carbon (Lopez, 2023; Supran & Oreskes, 2017). However, the need for more research on emancipatory imaginaries is emphasized if we are to solve the climate crisis in accordance with the principles of global climate justice.