The world faces one of its greatest challenges in climate change. As a global challenge, climate change demands a global response. A psychological approach with the goal to motivate large groups to engage in concerted action will need both, a perspective focused on individual factors and a perspective focused on the collective factors. The social identity approach is a promising and underutilized theoretical basis for the latter. In this special issue, we have brought together new and thought-provoking work on the effects of collective-level variables on pro-environmental action that builds on the social identity approach. This editorial will introduce the core idea of the approach and it will argue for its advantages. We will summarize important previous work on some of the essential variables of the approach and we will briefly introduce the contributions to this special issue which will hopefully stimulate more work in the years ahead.

世界面临着气候变化的最大挑战之一。作为全球性挑战，气候变化需要全球应对。以激励大型团体采取一致行动为目标的心理学方法既需要侧重于个人因素的观点，又应侧重于集体因素的观点。社会认同方法是后者的有前途且未得到充分利用的理论基础。在本期特刊中，我们汇集了新的，发人深省的工作，涉及基于社会认同方法的集体变量对亲环境行为的影响。这篇社论将介绍该方法的核心思想，并为其优势辩护。