Efforts to mitigate the climate crisis are contributions to one of the biggest and most critical public goods that society is facing today. Climate action has a strong cooperative component, whereby many of our actions do not pay-off individually despite entailing broad social benefits. We report field evidence on the causal impact of implementing novel education boosting intervention in high-schools on adolescents (n>750), measuring also indirect impacts on their parents (n>400). The boosting education intervention includes in addition to state-of-the-art scientific evidence on climate literacy adapted from Lawson et al. (2019), novel content specifically developed for this study on fostering cooperation in decision-making for climate action. This includes training three key elements of cooperation: First, training individual preferences, through an assessment of own climate impacts. Second, training strategic behavior, through understanding the relevance of strategic disincentives hindering cooperation. And third, training collective action, through developing a shared view in the classroom on ideal futures and commitments for climate action. We implement measures from different disciplines to assess causal impact of the boosting interventions, combining economically incentivized measures of cooperative preferences, incentivized belief elicitation about others’ cooperative preferences, as well as self-reported climate knowledge, awareness, concern and hope. The data collection procedures for adolescents, combining a baseline measure within one month prior to the interventions followed by a short-term measure within one month after the intervention (full sample) and a medium-term measure one year after the intervention (ongoing data collection), allows us to control for any pre-existing differences across the control and treatment students, thus cleanly assessing impact through difference-in-difference estimates. Results show a significant increase (13pp) in cooperative preferences of adolescents as measured in real-life donations to NGOs within one month after the interventions. We observe spillovers of the intervention beyond environmental conservation, as in addition to an increase in donations to a pro-environmental NGO, the intervention significantly increases donations to other social causes. All these effects are stronger for students at schools that are part of a “green-school” network. We also find evidence of spillovers of adolescents’ training into their parents: Parents in schools part of a “green” network significantly increase donations to
a pro-environmental conservation NGO, as well as increase their concern, hope, and self-reported behavior on climate mitigation. In sum, boosting climate action decision-making skills can foster cooperative preferences of adolescents for the climate, while generating spillovers both to other social welfare-enhancing causes as well as spillovers to their parents.