About

Gabrielle Wong-Parodi is an Associate Professor of Earth System Science and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. She is an interdisciplinary social scientist, grounded in psychology and decision science, who seeks to understand how people make decisions to address the impacts of climate change and how effective interventions can empower them to make decisions that benefit their lives, communities, and society. Her work primarily focuses on frontline communities experiencing the 'first and worst' of climate change. Dr. Wong-Parodi employs multiple convergent methods, including interviews, surveys, experiments, longitudinal designs, ecological momentary assessments, and remote and personal sensing. She pursues a community-based approach in her research, emphasizing collaboration with communities. Her research topics encompass energy, adaptation, mitigation, emerging technologies, conservation, health, and sustainability across the U.S., China, and Costa Rica. She currently serves on several advisory boards, including the American Psychological Association's Climate Change Task Force, the National Academies advisory board to the U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program, and the NSF's Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Science Plan. Dr. Wong-Parodi holds a B.A. in Psychology from UC Berkeley, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in Social and Behavioral Sciences from the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley.

Selected publications

• Subjective attribution, experiences, behaviors, and climate policy support during increasingly risky storms

  Cell Reports Sustainability · 2026-02-16 · 1 citations

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• Psychological and contextual determinants of clean energy technology adoption

  Nature Reviews Clean Technology · 2025-06-06 · 17 citations

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• Preparing patients with cancer and their providers for climate hazards: the role of qualitative research

  Cancer Causes & Control · 2025-05-30 · 1 citations

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• What Leads to Equitable Adaptation Intentions in City Practitioners?

  Climate Risk Management · 2025-01-01

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  Extreme events impact communities worldwide and it is likely that this impact will worsen. Preparing, responding, and adapting to extreme climate event impact is essential to reduce harm, and understanding the motivational factors driving adaptation behavior is crucial. Despite increasing awareness of the disproportionate and inequitable impact of these events on underserved communities and their prolonged recovery periods, empirical studies focusing on equitable adaptation behavior remain scarce. While previous research has primarily assessed adaptation behavior at the household level, there is less scholarship focusing on the other scales of decision-making that affect household capacity to adapt. This is especially the case regarding the association between motivational factors and city level practitioners’ adaptation behaviors and the impact of these behaviors on equitable adaptation. In this context, a necessary step to explore this relationship is understanding city practitioners’ adaptation intentions and behavior. In this study, we employed data collected from 2019-2023 from 46 cities who participated in an engaged research project in the US Gulf Coast region from 2019-2021 to better understand how the introduction of vulnerability discussions during the co-production of new knowledge may have influenced these practitioners’ intentions and behavior towards adaptation, especially concerning equitable outcomes. We advance a new conceptual framework – the Equitable Adaptation Model (EAM) – to explore the relationship between motivational factors and equitable adaptation intentions in city practitioners and we investigate whether discussing social vulnerability influences city practitioners' intentions to engage in equitable adaptation actions. We find a positive association between equitable adaptation intentions and perceived risk and perceived adaptation. We also find that introducing social vulnerability content during engagement positively affects city practitioners’ intentions to pursue equitable adaptation actions.

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• Scaling up actionable climate knowledge

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-11-26 · 1 citations

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  To address climate-driven crises, we need actionable climate knowledge to inform decision-making and support problem solving. Although the science of actionable knowledge is rapidly evolving, less is known about how and why actionable climate knowledge scales up and with what outcomes. We advance three outcome-driven pathways to scale up actionable climate knowledge: 1) broadening participation by increasing the diversity and number of actors involved in actionable climate knowledge coproduction; 2) diffusing actionable climate knowledge uptake among actors not originally involved in its coproduction, and 3) aggregating impact by coproducing actionable climate knowledge with influential actors, such as practitioners and policy-makers, whose decisions affect many others. These pathways can intersect, complement, interact, and tradeoff with each other. Understanding how these pathways work, evolve, and change is critical if we want to better inform the production and scaling of climate actionable knowledge to solve climate problems.

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• Underwater virtual reality for awe, ocean connectedness, and pro-environmental behavior: a randomized controlled trial

  Sustainability Science · 2025-11-08 · 2 citations

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  Abstract As the ocean’s capacity to sustain human and planetary health is increasingly jeopardized by anthropogenic stressors, there is an urgent need for the widespread adoption of pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs) to protect the marine ecosystems upon which all life on Earth depends. Underwater virtual reality (UVR)—i.e., wearing a waterproof VR headset while immersed in water—is a novel immersive technology offering realistic underwater experiences that may reduce visceral distance and thus enable greater psychological access to the marine world. This pre-registered study constitutes the first empirical investigation of UVR’s potential as an intervention tool for ocean conservation. Participants ( N = 214) were randomly allocated to one of three conditions with increasing levels of immersion (PC, VR, UVR) and watched two 5-minute 360-degree videos depicting underwater dives and encounters with charismatic megafauna. Psychological and behavioral responses were assessed through surveys immediately before, after, and one month post-intervention. Results show UVR’s significant effects on presence (vs. PC/VR); cybersickness, awe (time and physiological dimensions), ocean connectedness (vs. VR); and donations to a marine environmental cause (vs. PC). No effects were found on short-term behavioral intentions and long-term PEBs. Significant gender differences were found in most outcomes and presence predicted awe and ocean connectedness. Results indicate UVR’s unique ability to induce ocean connectedness more than nature connectedness; further empirical, theoretical, and practical implications, as well as limitations and future research directions, are discussed. Findings underscore UVR’s potential to induce significant psychological and behavioral responses to the marine environment that outperform less immersive media, thus advancing our understanding of its intervention potential for ocean conservation.

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• Navigating justice tensions in managed retreat

  Environmental Science & Policy · 2025-08-27

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• Examining individuals’ protective behavioral decision-making dynamics over repeated risks of heat waves in the American West

  Journal of Risk Research · 2025-12-02 · 1 citations

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• Visual displays for communicating multiple uncertain forecasts.

  Decision · 2025-07-01

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• Bridging community resilience and local planning for climate justice

  Climate Risk Management · 2025-12-02

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  As the effects of climate change increase, and as the federal government deprioritizes climate action, local governments must grapple with the complex challenge of enhancing resilience. Despite the importance of local-scale planning and finance for equitable climate resilience, the knowledge needed to support such efforts is poorly defined. We outline four challenge areas and corresponding priority considerations: capacity and governance, adaptation and recovery, funding mechanisms, and data and methodological needs. By strengthening knowledge and partnerships in each of these areas, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners can better support communities to respond to and recover from the effects of a changing climate.

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Awards & honors

• American Psychological Association's Climate Change Task For…
• National Academies advisory board to the U.S. Global Climate…
• National Science Foundation's Natural Hazards Engineering Re…