How people react to threatening information such as climate change is a
complicated matter. While people with a high environmental self-identity
tend to react approach-motivated by engaging in pro-environmental
behaviour, people of low environmental self-identity may exhibit
proximal defence behaviour, by avoiding and distracting themselves from
potentially threatening stimuli caused by identified anxious thoughts
and circumstances. This psychological theory has recently been tested in
experimental studies in which the results suggest that the promotion of
climate change information can also backfire. Based on these findings,
we propose an agent-based model to address influences on anxiety and
correlated pro-environmental actions in relation to societal attitudes
of climate change scepticism and environmental self-identity.