 The role of co-benefits in motivating climate change mitigation – Experimental evidenceChristoph Feldhaus, Marvin Gleue, Andreas Löschel and Peter Werner Ecological Economics, 2026, vol. 239, issue C Abstract: We study the role of co-benefits – positive effects of climate change mitigation projects in addition to CO2 reduction – in motivating individuals to donate to such projects. In two artefactual field experiments conducted with large population samples (n = 2400 in total), we test how the existence and specific nature of co-benefits affect donations. In both experiments, we find that co-benefits have a positive impact on participants' willingness to donate. Moreover, our second experiment shows that contributions respond to the nature of co-benefits, and these responses seem to be driven by individuals' preferences for specific types of co-benefits. We further observe that co-benefits also increase donations when making carbon footprints and thus individual responsibility for environmental externalities more salient. In sum, our study provides a comprehensive picture of the potential of co-benefits for increasing donations to climate change mitigation projects and has several implications for the provision of co-benefits information in practice. Keywords: Co-benefits; Climate change mitigation; Field experiment; Carbon-offsets; Charitable giving (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:239:y:2026:i:c:s0921800925002666 DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108783 Access Statistics for this article Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier |
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