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Open research questions in Pro-Environmental Behavior and Attitudes

1,154 gap statements mined from Pro-Environmental Behavior and Attitudes papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 7,815 papers on the topic — drawn mostly from each paper's own stated research gap, future-work, challenge and limitation notes, and its abstract. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one.

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What the literature leaves open

  • Second, universities need to create specific sustainability-related smartphone applications that will give students advice on environmental issues, recycling, saving energy, etc., and sustainability-related educational materials. These can reinforce students’ environmental awareness, while also fostering hands-on engagement with environmental issues, using interactive and tech-enhanced learning.

    Smartphone Use and Environmental Sustainability Awareness and Practices Among Students of Al Ain University: A Cross-Sectional Correlational Study · 2026 · DOI

  • Despite the positive results that environmental education (EE) and digital communication have brought about in the field of sustainability awareness, it remains unclear whether sustainable behavior can be achieved, or even sustained, without the presence of enabling subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, institutional opportunities, and mechanisms for meaningful participation.

    Smartphone Use and Environmental Sustainability Awareness and Practices Among Students of Al Ain University: A Cross-Sectional Correlational Study · 2026 · DOI

  • The need to balance effort costs, enforcement mechanisms, and social motivations in designing effective waste management policies. The risk of resistance and inequities when reducing perceived effort costs relative to penalties.

    The Path to full bins: integrating effort, social cohesion, and regulation · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of understanding of the mechanisms of individual decision-making and their interactions with institutional and social incentives. The need for a deeper investigation into the dynamics behind household recycling behavior. The gap between policy intention and behavioral outcomes in recycling.

    The Path to full bins: integrating effort, social cohesion, and regulation · 2026 · DOI

  • Future studies should examine how different PO routes—perceived control, intimate knowledge, and personal outcomes. First, individual differences in PO formation are not well understood. Third, the intersection between legal ownership and PO remains under-theorized and empirically understudied.

    Leveraging Psychological Ownership to Promote Pro-Environmental Behavior · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research might address this limitation through continuous state diffusion processes or multivariate autoregressive frameworks that more faithfully capture the complexity and simultaneity of environmental engagement dimensions.

    Assessing environmental education policy effectiveness: a stochastic dynamic model of pro-environmental behavior change in urban populations · 2026 · DOI

  • Addressing the ‘Why’, the framework unravels the underlying cognitive mechanism: environmental motivation (EM) alone is insufficient without the activating role of Perceived Benefits (PBO), which bridges abstract eco-consciousness into concrete behavioral action (COB).

    Why and When Airline Passengers Offset Carbon: Environmental Motivation, Perceived Benefits, and Travel Purpose · 2026 · DOI

  • If, as it is likely, engagement is driven by a small, highly engaged subgroup within the sample, novel ways to engage the less active users should be explored. One way to achieve this could be to supplement user-generated posts with clearly labeled researcher-provided examples whenever community-generated content is scarce.

    Toward less air travel: evidence from a multi-component field experiment combining GenAI and peer-based digital nudges · 2026 · DOI

  • The research must address the potential biases and limitations of using self-reported data from university students. The study needs to consider the cultural and educational context of traditional Chinese nature poetry appreciation.

    From aesthetic engagement to pro-environmental intention: the serial mediating roles of awe and green mindfulness in university students’ responses to traditional Chinese nature poetry · 2026 · DOI

  • The research must also address the complexity of the factors influencing bottled-water use among high school students. The study needs to ensure the generalizability of the findings to other populations and contexts.

    Attitudes Toward Bottled Water Among High School Students · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research could examine how academic backgrounds influence engagement with eco-literacy and sustainability-focused language instruction. While this study focused on students’ perceptions of eco-literacy in writing-focused ELT activities, future research should explore its impact on other language skills, such as reading, listening, and speaking.

    Environmental Education Through Eco-Literacy: Integrating Sustainability into English Language Teaching · 2025 · DOI

  • Future research should explore sectoral differences to develop targeted conservation strategies. Given the influence of ORGCULT, future studies should explore how workplace sustainability norms vary across different cultural, economic, and industry contexts. Future research should investigate the potential influence of SUBNORMS and PER-BCON as antecedents of organizational culture (ORGCULT).

    Redimensioning the Theory of Planned Behavior on Workplace Energy Saving Intention: The Mediating Role of Environmental Knowledge and Organizational Culture · 2025 · DOI

  • Future research should focus on enhancing the precision and reliability of RAG by addressing uncertainties in retrieved information and incorporating non-classical logic, such as Fuzzy and Paraconsistent Logic, to handle variability and ambiguity in data.

    Enhancing Environmental Control in Broiler Production: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Improved Decision-Making with Large Language Models · 2025 · DOI

  • We identified that source separation and delivery of hard-to-manage MSW is limited by a combination of psychosocial, structural, and institutional barriers that affect both motivation and the capacity for community action.

    Using Community-Based Social Marketing to Promote Pro-Environmental Behavior in Municipal Solid Waste Management: Evidence from Norte de Santander, Colombia · 2025 · DOI

  • Comments supported that theoretical values-teaching is insufficient and there needs to be concrete actions as well. Further research on the framework’s effectiveness: Through the VbESD pilot programs and subsequent implementation, research to determine the framework’s effectiveness and real-world added value will be instrumental in assessing the success of the framework as well as ensuring its continued improvement.

    Values-Based Education for Sustainable Development (VbESD): Introducing a Pedagogical Framework for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Using a Values-Based Education (VbE) Approach · 2024 · DOI

  • These include a lack of adequate skills and interest of teachers, difficulty in integrating ICT use into the curriculum, anxiety and a lack of confidence, fear of change, and a lack of personal change-management skills, limited knowledge and understanding of how to make full use of embedding SDGs enabled by ICTs, and a lack of teacher incentives to ICTeEfS.

    Predictors of Motivation and Barriers to ICT-Enabling Education for Sustainability · 2024 · DOI

  • This review identified prevailing correlates that warrant further investigation, including pro-environmental attitudes, environmental knowledge, perceived behavioral control, personal norms, connectedness with nature, climate change concern, parents’ PEB, communication with parents and peers concerning societal issues, parents’ and peers’ descriptive norms, and engagement in school or community green activities.

    Predictors of Pro-Environmental Behaviors in Adolescence: A Scoping Review · 2024 · DOI

  • The influence of physical conditions and emotions on environmental decision-making remains unknown. Another limitation of this study is the potential influence of translation and cultural response biases. Further research on parenting styles, gender combinations in dyads, and cultural differences in sustainable family choices is required.

    Parent–Child Intergenerational Associations of Environmental Attitudes, Psychological Barriers, and Pro-Environmental Behaviors in Japan and China · 2024 · DOI

  • While we find that teachers’ sense of responsibility positively influences student engagement in green building learning, future research should explore additional mediating or moderating factors like ambivalence, self-educational expectations, and psychological distress to fully understand this relationship.

    The Multilevel Chain Mediating Mechanism of College Faculty’s Felt Responsibility on Students’ Engagement in Green Building Learning · 2024 · DOI

  • This pattern aligns with studies showing that targeted information or reflective opportunities on the broader consequences of dietary choices can increase the salience of underrecognized motives such as animal welfare, fair labor, and ecological concerns.

    Longitudinal changes in motivational determinants of sustainable diets during a pilot blended digital behavior change intervention: A mixed methods study · 2026 · DOI

  • PN is positively related to the intention to separate waste.

    Examining Patriotism and Environmental Responsibility for Waste Separation in Ghana · 2026 · DOI

  • The second author, affiliated with Qatar’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education, was raised in Qatar and has long-standing familiarity with the country’s education system, cultural practices, and Islamic social context.

    From following to caring and acting: analyzing social media's role in shaping mindsets and transforming habits for sustainable living · 2026 · DOI

  • Much of this previous research has found mixed results, with some finding that the level of climate anxiety does not indicate a person’s likelihood for pro-environment behaviours, or a “greener” lifestyle.

    The Relationship between Climate Anxiety and Pro-Environment Behaviours · 2024 · DOI

  • Investigate the impact of social capital on waste recycling behavior in other contexts, - Examine the relationship between social capital and other pro-environmental…

    When neighbors recycle together: social capital and sustainable waste management in Osaki Town, Japan · 2026 · DOI

  • Central European Review of Economics and Management, 3(3), 19–44.

    Can Sustainable Schools Influence Environmental Consciousness and Behavior in Early Childhood? The Perspectives of Early Childhood Educators · 2025 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Pro-Environmental Behavior and Attitudes

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Open questions raised by papers listed on this page include: (1) The lack of understanding of the mechanisms of individual decision-making and their interactions with institutional and social incentives (“The Path to full bins: integrating effort, social cohesion, and regulation”, 2026); (2) Future studies should examine how different PO routes—perceived control, intimate knowledge, and personal outcomes (“Leveraging Psychological Ownership to Promote Pro-Environmental Behavior”, 2026); (3) Future research might address this limitation through continuous state diffusion processes or multivariate autoregressive frameworks that more faithfully capture the complexity and simultaneity of environmental engagement dimensions (“Assessing environmental education policy effectiveness: a stochastic dynamic…”, 2026); (4) One way to achieve this could be to supplement user-generated posts with clearly labeled researcher-provided examples whenever community-generated content is scarce (“Toward less air travel: evidence from a multi-component field experiment…”, 2026); (5) Future research could examine how academic backgrounds influence engagement with eco-literacy and sustainability-focused language instruction (“Environmental Education Through Eco-Literacy: Integrating Sustainability into…”, 2025). 1,154 gap statements have been mined from Pro-Environmental Behavior and Attitudes papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 7,815 papers on the topic; the gaps come from whichever of those papers state one. They are mostly the research gaps the authors state and the papers' abstracts, plus future-work, limitations and challenges passages. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one, so you can read the original claim in context.

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