Emotional responses to climate change in Norway and Ireland: cross-cultural validation of the Inventory of Climate Emotions (ICE)

There is an increasing research interest in emotional responses to climate change and their role in climate action and psycho-social impacts of climate change. Recently, addressing a gap in methods, Marczak et al. (2022) developed the Inventory of Climate Emotions (ICE), a measure of eight distinct emotional responses to climate change. Yet, the ICE was developed in a single cultural context only (Poland), and its concurrent validity was tested using a limited set of variables. Here, we contribute to the scientific debate about emotional responses to climate change with original quality-controlled data from the general populations in Norway (N = 491) and Ireland (N = 485). We first confirm the 8-factor structure of the Norwegian and English versions of the ICE via confirmatory factor analyses (CFA). Next, we demonstrate a high degree of cross-cultural measurement invariance of the ICE across Norway, Ireland and Poland. In the final step, we corroborate and extend the nomological span of climate emotions, showing that they are differentially linked to climate change perceptions, mitigation policy support, various socio-demographics, loneliness and alienation, as well as to environmental activism and the willingness to renounce one’s own immediate self-interests in favour of the natural environment. Overall, this research presents evidence for the structural, cross-cultural and concurrent validity of the ICE. Moreover, it provides tools and an informed basis for cross-cultural research on emotional responses to climate change.