Effective climate change mitigation requires profound lifestyle changes and citizens’ support for transformational climate policies. Research on affecting such changes is often fragmented, focussing on single behaviours, ignoring civic and political behaviour, and detached from people’s real lives. We present here the first comprehensive, rich dataset of people’s daily real-life behaviours across a range of domains including civic and political behaviours collected over eight weeks via a bespoke smartphone app, enriched by people’s daily reflections on their change trajectories and by data on emotions, agency, socio-demographics, values, attitudes and social norm. The pre-registered field-experiment shows that exposing people to moral reasoning results in carbon footprint reduction in domains where they feel agency and in greater civic and political engagement, necessary to advance transformational climate policies. This is further aided by fostering behavioural competence. Finally, our data reveals the importance of individual circumstances and the nonlinearity of change trajectories.
