An Evening With Molly Kawahata: a Hopeful Horizon for Climate
- Chase Noteware
- Jun 12, 2024
- 1 min read
My family and I are active members of the Park City Climate Fund, a group that I also intern with. Recently, the PCCF hosted Molly Kawahata, a former Climate Advisor to the Obama administration. Molly’s presentation focused on how to foster hope and catalyze climate action by bridging communications, human cognition, and the science of hope. This was interesting to me because I have always thought of hope as an emotion, not a cognitive process.
Molly’s work draws heavily on work from psychologists and scientists such as C.R. Snyder, Ph.D. (University of Kansas), Chan Hellman, Ph.D. (University of Oklahoma), Shane Lopez, Ph.D. (Gallup), and Andrew Abeyta, Ph.D. (Rutgers University). Molly defines hope as a cognitive process by which individuals can set goals and develop actionable steps to achieve results. It involves both pathway thinking (i.e., thinking about strategies to use in pursuing goals) and agency thinking (i.e., the general belief that those goals can be achieved).
Molly notes that hope can be meaningfully experienced at both the individual and group level and she believes fostering hope, rather than fear, is crucial to bringing about systemic changes needed to address the climate crisis. Empirical research shows that hopeful people are more inclined to participate in community actions that address climate change and that community leaders can inspire agency and pathway thinking to facilitate such action.
You can listen to Molly’s interview with our local Park City radio station (KPCW) here:
If you are interested in reading more about the science of hope, here are a couple of suggestions:
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