PLOS Climate PhD interview: Zahra Rahmani

In the latest in our series of interviews with PhD students in climate research, PLOS Climate speaks to Zahra Rahmani of the University of Basel, Switzerland.

What did you study before your PhD, and why did you decide to go on to do a PhD?

I studied psychology and, after graduation, I worked as a counselor in a clinical setting treating patients with mental health problems. During my time as a grad student, I had always enjoyed doing empirical research: I published the results from my master thesis experiment and was involved in multiple research projects as a visiting student researcher at UC Berkeley. I have also always been fascinated with data analysis and taught courses in statistics and statistical analysis with R. Somehow, the word spread that you could make me happy with messy datasets and thanks to that, I assisted with the data cleaning and analysis for multiple research projects. I somewhat incidentally came across a PhD position in environmental psychology on public perceptions of climate change and sustainable behavior, and I was immediately excited: it encompassed all the things I liked about scientific research in a domain which had already preoccupied me in all of my free time. Climate change had always been on my mind and I wanted my professional life to reflect that.

Could you tell us about your project? What are the key questions you’re hoping to address, and what methods/approaches are you using?

My main research project tackles questions on how people form and change their minds around climate change and climate action. Who supports climate policies or advocates for climate mitigation, and how malleable are those attitudes when people encounter new arguments on these topics? I am particularly interested in the interplay between societal factors (for instance, whether a country is polarized on environmental topics or what the information environment looks like) and personal factors (for instance, political orientation) and how both factors influence “attitude trajectories”. That is, whether opinions on a certain environmental matter or climate policy become more or less radical over time, or more accurate. On a societal level, these attitude trajectories then also influence which narratives around climate change prevail. The flip side of these questions is to look at effective communication about climate change: What messages about a climate measure do people pay most attention to and which messages possibly inspire behavior change? Ultimately, I would like to improve scientific communication around climate change so that societies will be better informed about climate change and can make better informed decisions about climate solutions.

I employ experimental tasks where I observe what content people engage with and how they respond to novel messages. For instance, in my latest research, I used an information sampling paradigm where participants could read arguments in favor or against several climate policies. This allowed me to identify the information acquisition style of people: some people would search information for and against climate policies in a balanced way, others mostly sought out information that was congruent with what they initially believed and yet others decided not to engage with the topic at all. In the next step, I try to map how these patterns of information acquisition predict changes in attitudes, if people support the policies more or less than they did initially. I also try to build a cross-cultural focus, collecting data from representative samples in multiple countries: this way, I can better understand which results are context-specific and which results are more universal across participants from different countries or demographics.

What excites you most about your project, and about the wider field?

To me, finding ways to live sustainably within the planetary boundaries, preserving eco-systems and a climate equilibrium while maintaining (or achieving) high levels of well-being is one of the greatest challenges of humanity. I want to understand how people respond in the face of environmental crises and how we can encourage healthy and sustainable lifestyles. We already have technical solutions at hand to decarbonize our industries and to transition towards “net-zero societies”, but the implementation of such solutions has been painstakingly slow and progress is non-continuous: therefore, we also need to understand the social and psychological factors that enable or hinder such large-scale transformations.

Besides that, I also find the scientific process in itself exciting and creative: we start with a curious question and then approach it from different angles and develop an experimental design to answer these questions step-by-step. I think the hardest task is to make these two approaches compatible: with limited resources, we need to come up with experimental designs that are not only theoretically fascinating but can result in insights that prove useful for policymakers or individuals and can actually inform real-world climate action.

Where you would like to take your career next?

I would love to stay in academia and continue developing my research ideas. Teaching, mentoring and supervision are also incredibly rewarding parts of this work for me. At the same time, I think we’re at a turning point: the surge of large language models requires us to rethink how we conduct research and how we teach, how we train future graduates and researchers. I see this as an important challenge, one that we can turn into an opportunity if we dare to ask bigger questions and aim to move things on the ground, in our local communities, or push for institutional and policy change. If our research has real-world impact, that still distinguishes us from what LLMs can do.

What are your thoughts on the future of climate research? 

I think it is important that we uphold the collaborative spirit of assembling the best available evidence in joint efforts like the IPCC. Given that climate research, and sometimes even the researchers, are politically attacked and the competition for research funding is increasingly fierce, it is important to document the degree of certainty of climate models and projections.

I also think that climate research in the future needs to be more interdisciplinary than it already is. The technical foundations are strong, we understand the physics of climate change very well and we need to continue monitoring the impact of climate change on ecosystems and urban spaces with higher local granularity and to advance climate mitigation and adaptation tools. Beyond the technical aspects, new questions arise on social, political, and behavioral issues: How do we implement solutions? How do societies coordinate? How do we deal with resistance and misinformation? Ultimately, we also want to apply the lessons learned on climate change and international coordination to other global challenges and emergencies.