Expanding the Space of Climate Agency: From Individual Decisions to System Dynamics

Young people show a growing willingness to contribute to climate change mitigation, yet empirical evidence consistently highlights the persistence of misconceptions, fragmented knowledge, and difficulties in translating intentions into effective action. This lack of orientation is not surprising given the complexity of the socio‑ecological processes at stake. It is therefore crucial to develop educational tools to support individuals in critically engaging with these challenges, developing the ability to make informed decisions and take effective action. Supporting orientation toward agency in such contexts requires educational strategies capable of making systemic dynamics visible, explorable, and grounded in real-world data. This contribution is developed within the ENCOMPASS project, a multidisciplinary research initiative integrating perspectives from philosophy, economics, and science education to investigate agency in the context of climate change. ENCOMPASS conceptualises agency through three complementary and integrated lenses: epistemic-driven, ethical-refelctive and systemic-pragmatic. For this contribution, we focus on the systemic–pragmatic dimension of agency, which expands the space of action by linking individual decision-making to system-level dynamics and collective consequences.

It is specifically focused on food practices, i.e., day-to-day ‘simple’ decisions that offer significant individual climate-change mitigation opportunities. In particular, we study two key behaviours: reducing meat consumption and reducing food waste, analysing perceptions, barriers, and drivers of adoption.

The research follows two phases: (i) an exploratory qualitative analysis with students from two Italian upper‑secondary schools through focus groups, which generated concept maps used to identify the most crucial issues and thus relevant variables; (ii) the design and administration of a structured survey to a representative sample of the Italian population (N=1400).

The survey investigated individual food-related choices and behaviours in real contexts with a strong focus on the motivations and the characteristics of the context in which they were taken. Moreover, through the use of validated scales we evaluate perceptions, concerns, values, knowledge, social and moral norms of respondents. These dimensions allow for a detailed analysis of how beliefs, cognitive factors, social influences, and socio-demographic characteristics affect individual adoption of more climate-friendly and sustainable food-practices. The outputs of the analysis of this data collection are used as the empirical base to calibrate a system-dynamics simulation-model identifying potential dynamics of behaviour adoption among individuals. This modelling can generate interactive scenarios showing the (aggregated) effects of changes to individual behaviours, which could potentially contribute to strengthen youth orientation toward sustainable food-choices.

The model enables the exploration of feedback mechanisms and scenario-based outcomes, illustrating how individual decisions may aggregate and evolve within a complex system over time. We argue that empirically grounded SD simulations can function as powerful educational tools, supporting learners in critically engaging with complex socio-ecological processes, exploring “what-if” scenarios, and understanding the systemic implications of everyday decisions. By bridging individual action, empirical data, and system-level modelling, this work contributes to expanding the space of climate agency in education and beyond.

The proposed modelling approach allows agency to be examined through the dynamic relations between individual decisions and system-level outcomes, offering a concrete way to analyse how possibilities for action are shaped, enabled, and constrained within complex socio-ecological systems.