The power of loss: message framing, climate anxiety, and engagement in personal carbon trading

As global carbon emissions continue to rise and climate targets grow increasingly urgent, promoting voluntary low-carbon behaviors has become a critical component of climate policy. Among various behavior-oriented instruments, Personal Carbon Trading (PCT) offers a promising yet underutilized strategy for incentivizing individual emissions reduction, though public participation remains limited due to psychological and communicative barriers. This study investigates how message framing (gain vs. loss) influences individuals' willingness to participate in PCT, and whether this effect is mediated by climate change anxiety (CCA) and moderated by two psychological traits: felt responsibility (FR) and green self-efficacy (GSE). Drawing upon Prospect Theory, Norm Activation Theory, and Self-Efficacy Theory, we conducted an online experiment with randomized stimuli and analyzed the responses of 788 participants. The results show that loss-framed messages significantly enhance voluntary engagement intention (VEI) towards PCT compared to gain-framed messages. Moreover, CCA partially mediates the relationship between message framing and VEI, confirming the emotional pathway through which message framing operates. Importantly, both FR and GSE moderate these effects, such that loss framing is more effective among individuals with higher levels of responsibility or efficacy. These findings advance theoretical understanding of the framing-emotion-intention pathway while offering evidence-based strategies for designing personalized environmental communications that promote voluntary participation in PCT.