Climate targets have long been treated as technical challenges, focused on infrastructure and behaviour change. Yet as climate movements show, people often need to connect emotionally to the facts in order to be compelled to act by them. Whether goals mobilise action or not depends on how they are felt and negotiated in everyday life.
Nottingham, a city in the East Midlands region of the UK, is one of the most deprived local authority areas in England. Yet the city aims to become the UK’s first carbon-neutral city by 2028 by prioritising social justice as well as environmental sustainability.
My PhD research is based on interviews and collaborative workshops with 50 residents, activists, businesses, third sector organisations and elected officials in Nottingham.
My findings highlight how four emotions frequently shape how people have engaged with action towards a sustainable future, be it through love for place, fear of loss or risk, anger at injustice or hope for something better. These emotional reactions reveal why transformation rarely follows neat plans or frameworks.
Many people in Nottingham are involved in climate action because they care deeply about where they live. Love for neighbourhoods, green spaces and future generations motivates people to grow food, protect parks and work together on local projects.
This kind of care helps turn climate change from a distant, abstract problem into something rooted in place and everyday life.
Love here is a verb. It is about taking action with characteristics of care, affection, responsibility, respect and commitment in service of the futures we want to see and the things we want to protect.
Yet love can also exclude. Strong attachments to place can lead to protection in ways that shut others out.
In community green spaces, for example, efforts to protect allotments have led to suspicion of newcomers and resistance to change, resulting in the exclusion of certain community members. Love can both support and complicate just, city-wide action.
Fear and anger
Fear shapes people’s responses too. Worry about rising bills, the knock-on effects of climate change and political instability pushed some people to act, while for others this fear is paralysing.
Activists spoke about burnout, personal risk due to increasingly draconian policing over activism, and feeling stretched too thin when involved in several projects. Fear shaped how people related in communal spaces.
Much like love, fear around “others”, ownership and control sometimes led to exclusion. These anxieties were often amplified by media narratives about threat and scarcity, making collaboration more difficult. Fear can motivate action but can also limit who is allowed or able to take part.
Read more: Why anger, anxiety and anguish are understandable psychological reactions to the climate crisis
My conversations with people in the city show that anger is prevalent. Citizens expressed frustration with local decision-making, national policy failures and economic systems seen to prioritise profit over people and the environment, signalling important unmet justice claims.
This anger often became a catalyst for action. It fuelled campaigns, community organising and challenges to existing power structures. Yet, if ignored, anger can lead to disillusionment and disengagement.
Hope also plays an important part in transformation efforts in the city. However, citizens note an important distinction between hope and blind optimism. Their hope is often practical and grounded, helping people keep going despite slow progress and uncertainty.
Community gardens, food projects, DIY retrofitting and other local initiatives became places where people could see change taking shape, however small. Yet hope remains fragile – continued austerity, lack of long-term funding and institutional commitments that fail to deliver real change often undermined trust and can threaten hope.
These emotions do not operate in isolation or have fixed consequences. Love often coexists with fear. Anger can fuel hope. Together, they produce complex and non-linear pathways to change.
Nottingham’s experience shows that achieving carbon neutrality is not just about technology or targets. Its success depends on whether people feel included, heard and supported.
When emotions are ignored, climate policies risk becoming superficial or exclusionary. When they are taken seriously, transformation becomes more just and practical for the places in which it is occurring.
This can be achieved through participatory processes and co-production that make space for emotional expression, recognise the labour involved, and resist technocratic approaches that sideline people’s experiences. For Nottingham and other cities around the globe facing similar pressures, attending to how transformation is felt may matter just as much as how progress is measured.
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