Project Milestone 4 📃 - The Policy Brief on Climate Lobbying and Opinion Dynamics is now available to be downloaded.
📃 Report Description
This Policy Brief targets policymakers and regulators designing climate-governance rules on lobbying transparency, corporate climate-claim substantiation, and safeguards in high-leverage decision arenas. It builds on the ALMONDO project, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU (NRRP), which develops an opinion-dynamics model to analyze how climate lobbying shifts beliefs when individuals update views under cognitive biases such as underreaction and motivated reasoning.
The model identifies a credibility–reach trade-off: lobbying influence is maximized at a moderate-to-high investment in credibility, while excessive credibility-building crowds out outreach and reduces overall impact. Under polarization, repeatedly targeting aligned actors yields diminishing returns; influence increasingly concentrates on uncommitted “swing” actors, and hub-targeting strategies are effective only when network diffusion outweighs direct lobbying reach.
Evidence from a nationally representative Italian survey experiment (N=1,633) complements these results: advocacy messages modestly increase belief in climate-change reality (+2 pp), whereas skeptical messages generate larger belief declines (–2.9 pp on reality; –4.7 pp on human causation) once survey biases are accounted for.
Overall, the findings support extending substantiation and disclosure rules to policy-facing communications, strengthening transparency and conflict-of-interest safeguards in key decision venues, reinforcing integrity standards for high-reach intermediaries, and introducing late-stage transparency mechanisms to deter decisive last-minute influence campaigns.