PCLM-D-24-00100

What triggers individual climate actions in different neighbourhoods? Individual, collective, cultural, and socio-structural factors

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Klöckner,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 24 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Kim-Pong Tam

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

Journal Requirements:

1. Please include a complete copy of PLOS’ questionnaire on inclusivity in global research in your revised manuscript. Our policy for research in this area aims to improve transparency in the reporting of research performed outside of researchers’ own country or community. The policy applies to researchers who have travelled to a different country to conduct research, research with Indigenous populations or their lands, and research on cultural artefacts. The questionnaire can also be requested at the journal’s discretion for any other submissions, even if these conditions are not met.  Please find more information on the policy and a link to download a blank copy of the questionnaire here: https://journals.plos.org/climate/s/best-practices-in-research-reporting. Please upload a completed version of your questionnaire as Supporting Information when you resubmit your manuscript.

2. Please upload all main figures as separate Figure files in .tif or .eps format only. For more information about how to convert and format your figure files please see our guidelines:

https://journals.plos.org/climate/s/figures

3. Please amend your detailed Financial Disclosure statement. This is published with the article. It must therefore be completed in full sentences and contain the exact wording you wish to be published.

a. State the initials, alongside each funding source, of each author to receive each grant.

b. State what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role in your study, please state: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

c. If any authors received a salary from any of your funders, please state which authors and which funders.

If you did not receive any funding for this study, please simply state: “The authors received no specific funding for this work.”

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

I am very glad that I was able to secure two experts in the related research areas to review your manuscript. Both reviewers reported that your manuscript was interesting and had great potential to make significant contributions to the literature, but they also raised some issues that would need to be clarified or addressed with a revision. I read the manuscript independently and came up with a similar assessment. I think some revision is necessary before the manuscript can be considered for publication in the journal.

Specifically, other than the comments by the two reviewers, please make sure you also adequately address the following issues:

1. I strongly agree with you that we need to take a multi-level perspective to understand climate action by individuals. That said, I would like to see a more wholistic discussion of which “levels” are relevant, which of them have been widely studied, and which have been overlooked in previous studies, before introducing your focus on neighborhood. Put it differently, I think it is necessary to more elaborately situate “neighbourhoods” in the layers of context that people live in, and why some of the other layers are left out in the present research (echoing a comment by one of the reviewers).

2. I am not sure if I understand the section “Socio-structural factors influencing climate action” well. The points in this section seem a bit scattered (things like lifestyle, gender, age, education etc. are mentioned) and do not seem to present a clear and coherent argument as to what “socio-structural” actually means. Some revision is needed I guess.

3. I agree that social capital, rural vs. urban, and time of residence are interesting factors to investigate, but the introduction sections currently do not present a clear line of reasoning as to why these factors are relevant (e.g., what are known and not yet known about their effects on climate action) and what your hypotheses are. In fact, social capital and time of residence are not even mentioned until the very end of the introduction sections. Overall, I think the manuscript would benefit from a more elaborate explanation for each of the included variables (in terms of its definition, its relevance to climate action, and its expected effect in your investigation).

4. Probably there is a need to report more information about your sampling of countries and neighborhoods. How were these countries and neighborhoods sampled?

5. You reported that the neighbourhoods had been studied with qualitative methods before you designed this survey study. I think readers would be more able to appreciate the contributions of the qualitative part if more details are presented about it.

6. I am curious if the sample size has enough statistical power for testing some of the examined effects (the interaction effects, in particular).

7. Is it necessary to dichotomize length of residence? Why is it not just treated as an interval variable?

8. Please also comment on whether measurement invariance has been established for your measures.

I look forward to reading your revised manuscript.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: I don't know

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Dear authors,

your present an interesting study investigating the neighborhood effects on concrete climate actions. I have some concerns, however, which you can find below:

1. You state that neighborhoods are a main driver of climate actions. However, in your results it seams that the effect of individual action is stronger than the collective pathway.

2. Furthermore, when the scope of your paper is to investigate the effects of neighborhoods on climate actions, why do you not opt for a multi-level analysis, where participants are nested within the neighborhoods? Did you check if this was appropriate?

3. In the same way, neighborhoods are compared to a certain extent (using Austria as a reference). I somewhat agree with you, when you state that Finnish participants reported significantly less climate actions than the others. However, it is not really an inferential test. Although Norway and Italy has a positive estimate, please, if you want to make this statement use Finland as a reference (this can be reported in the Appendix).

4. My biggest concern is the way that you use the number of climate actions reported as the AV. These are very diverse actions, starkly varying in their behavior cost. I am not convinced that adding the number of actions to form an index is appropriate. Some of the items are further much easier to perform for rural (e.g., growing own vegetables) / urban residents (commuting). This should be considered before forming an index.

5. Another concern is using intentions to predict climate actions. Why was it chosen to use intentions as a middleman for climate actions? Why not directly predict behavior and circumvent the ubiquity of studies reporting a “intention-behavior” gap?

Reviewer #2: This is an interesting paper that aims to identify most relevant factors that are associated with climate actions of

individuals on the neighbourhood level. The choice of an individual set in the setting of a neighbourhood is an appropriate scale to measure individual and social influences. The authors focus on individual, cultural, social and structural aspects and leave out political, economic and technical aspects.

Introduction: The authors provide a brief introduction to the scale of the neighbourhood and then move on to explain the 4 selected aspects. Here, I encourage them to deepen their literature discussion as the individual set in the neighbourhood has a rich scholarship, pre-dating climate action (e.g. see literature of neighbourhood social capital starting from the 1960s).

Page 4 + Figure 1: It is important to discuss why the 4 aspects were selected and the 3 left out. How do the authors understand the interconnectedness of these 7 aspects and what are the risks of leaving out 3 and how can this be addressed in interpreting the results? This is important as the authors first encourage us to think of these as interconnected but then suddenly depart with 4 preselected aspects.

Page 5 (last paragraph): You claim that technological developments have led to weakening of social ties. However, technological developments like apps connecting neighbours present a counter argument (e.g. Whatsapp groups, Nebanan etc.). I encourage you present a complete picture in this paragraph.

Method: sample selection: It is important to elaborate why these 9 neighbourhoods were selected. What are the similarities and differences and how does this impact the interpretation of the results? Was it based on the 4 pre-selected aspects that you intend to measure? For example, socio-economic variability across neighbourhoods (not only individual, as is reported in the paper) needs to be made transparent and discussed.

Disharmony in results: As a reader I was curious to see if the researchers found disharmonious data at the interface of individual and collective scale. E.g. individuals feeling restricted by their neighbours opposing to their solar panels as it destroys the neighbourhood aesthetic or vice-versa individuals feeling disgruntled by collective neighbourhood festivities that generate a lot of single-use plastic. For me the results were quite uniform, harmonious and uni-directional given the large sample size.

Discussion: Given that the authors indicate the important influence of social capital, it is important to dwell on how can this be created in neighbourhoods where this is absent? Here, I encourage the authors to dwell on some policy/planning recommendations.

Overall, it is an interesting paper that encourages us to understand the interface of individual and collective action at the neighbourhood scale. I encourage the authors to present a complete and complex picture of what neighbourhood climate action is and can be. I hope the review comments are helpful in this regard.

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6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

PCLM-D-24-00100R1

What triggers individual climate actions in different neighbourhoods? Individual, collective, cultural, and socio-structural factors

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Klöckner,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. The manuscript is now reviewed. Based on the reviews, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 24 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Kim-Pong Tam

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

Journal Requirements:

1. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Thanks a lot for submittig your revision to us. The two original reviewers kindly reviewed you revised manuscript; both agreed that the revised manuscript has adequately all the comments raised previously. One of the reviewers listed two minor issues for further consideration. Please address these two issues in the next revision, which I will read and make the final decision without sending to review again.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: I don't know

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Dear authors,

thank you for taking into account my comments on the first version of the manuscript.

I am positive that most of my recommendations have been addressed, however, I have a few remaining concerns, which I would like to see addressed. Thus I have recommended a minor revision.

1. With regard to my previous comment in taking the difficulty into account a like that you have now used a Rasch-model. However I do not agree with figure 2. The percentages do not neccesarily completely overlap with the dificulties, as they are estimated in a Rasch-model. Please extract the item difficulties from the model and report these. Furhter please use an appropriate reference on why a Rasch-model is used (there are many to chose from). Finally diet is coded in a way that it now has more than 2 response categories. In my understanding a Rasch-model expects binary data as input, while Partial Credit Models or Rating Scale Models in IRT handle these kind of coding. Please double check.

2. [just a comment] In your response to my last comment, I am wondering why your variables cannot explain behavior independently from the intention. This in itself would be an interesting results. However, this would go beyond the scope of your paper.

Reviewer #2: I congratulate the authors on reflecting on the review comments and revising the manuscript. Explicitly stating the hypotheses has been helpful in scoping the paper. I also appreciate the elaboration of limitations and food for thought for future research in this area.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

What triggers individual climate actions in different neighbourhoods? Individual, collective, cultural, and socio-structural factors

PCLM-D-24-00100R2

Dear Dr. Klöckner,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'What triggers individual climate actions in different neighbourhoods? Individual, collective, cultural, and socio-structural factors' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. 

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact climate@plos.org.

Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Kim-Pong Tam

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):