Anthropologists point out that part of what makes humans unique amongst species is communication to be able to undertake unilateral, coordinated action towards certain ends. In the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, our limits have become apparent. This may be because humans are also hardwired towards prioritising risks that they can sense using their evolutionary instincts – generally short-term and visible. See more and more people wearing masks, and progressively emptier public spaces, and the message gets through. Evolutionary psychologists tell us this makes us bad at decisions that require long-term planning horizons and indirect threats, and at making sacrifices without immediate or tangible reward. Therefore, it is critical to have leaders that can foment institutional, technological and behavioral change towards climate change mitigation and adaptation, even if certain stakeholders are resistant. The pandemic has shown us that we are indeed capable of acting swiftly, decisively and effectively on a major threat to our wellbeing.

The type of reaction needed is made difficult when our fates are being decided in a multilateral system in which ambition is decided by the lowest common denominator – bad faith actors that are always countries with fossil fuel resources. These countries operate under undue corporate influence and the consideration of short-term election cycles, and where democracy is frayed or missing, the impulse to stay in power. This has resulted not in years, but decades, of delayed action on the biggest existential threat humankind has ever faced. Never has the phrase ‘we are only as strong as our weakest link’ been more applicable, than to global-scale threats such as pandemics and climate change.

One such bad-faith actor has steered the course of our reaction to climate change. When COVID-19 was largely seen as a China-limited issue, the U.S. Republican party vocally denied that coronavirus would ever be a threat. One of their members wore a gas mask on the floor of their lower house to mock the concern of the opposition party, while Donald Trump called the virus a hoax. This has mimicked their attitude to climate change, which Trump has also called a hoax. These are the political machinations of a government of the world’s superpower, the same superpower that has pulled out of two international climate agreements (both the results of years and decades of painstaking negotiations) and consistently lowered ambition in international climate change negotiations. To illustrate, we may right now have been chasing a 1.5C instead of a 2C temperature rise curtailment goal: in 2018, at international climate change negotiations, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Russia objected to ‘welcoming’ the IPCC report detailing the importance of this revised goal, nixing any downstream increases in ambition. The United States has had the economic and financial clout to influence other countries in collectively bend the curve but has consistently and overall failed to do so.

Instead, Post-Paris agreement, rich world institutions are still growing the fossil fuel economy, by subsidising and funding it, all while viable alternatives exist. Moreover, the logic driving the growth (and inequality) imperative is based on outdated economics. An enormous amount of waste and inefficiency, duplication and redundancy exists in the name of economic growth, based on models that treat the environment and atmosphere as expendable input and waste sinks, and capital as the chief measure of concern in accounting.

Eventually, once climate change has manifested to a degree where its impacts are irrefutable, and should there be democratic process left in a sufficient number of institutions, our global publics will demand action. The goal should be to pre-empt this theoretical point of action-upon-manifestation, to look at the exponential growth curves of active COVID-19 cases and plot in our minds the potential for the same trajectory of runaway with climate. This is where clima-tude comes to bear, as it proves to us that we are capable of evolving as a species, to perceive risks that the early-evolved parts of our brains have an in-built bias against, and to take action on what may seem like faith alone. Just as we cannot see a virus and we act on the faith of what virologists tell us, so too should we act on the faith of climate scientists, climate economists, risk assessors and security specialists.

Ultimately, the lessons with COVID-19 are that the value of sacrifice is an easy calculation to make, and that global cooperation is vital in countering a global threat. Countries are cooperating to beat back the spread of the virus, and the moment we are having right now is what it feels like to fight a common enemy. Cooperation means sharing information, resources, technological and institutional know-how. Italy is warning the rest of Europe that they are not taking the COVID-19 threat seriously enough, China is sending medical staff to Italy, factories are being retrofitted to produce hand-sanitiser. The likelihood that we will take necessary action, confident that others are like-minded and dedicated, is vastly increased by a  culture of cooperation, rather than a retreat into our lagers and stooping to hamstering – whether with toilet paper during the pandemic, or status-signaling conspicuous consumption all the while. In the context of climate change, carrying on with business as usual is a race to the bottom of perceived self-preservation.

Underscoring this cooperation is the reality that we share a planet, and in the language of epidemics, our movement and interaction affects everyone, just as in the language of climate and global change, so too does our impact on this planet. How interconnected we are, will become visible beyond this pandemic, through drought-induced drops in food production, increased terrorism risk and conflict that inevitably draws in countries. The same rising ocean will lap further and further up our shores, as the same strain of demagogue will attempt to take advantage of the fear generated amongst publics.

There is by now an iconic cartoon in which an audience member asks a presenter ‘What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?’. One noteworthy 2018 study has found that creating this better world will save us, not cost us, $26 trillion by 2030 if we act meaningfully on climate change (not considering the incalculable benefit of preventing deaths and reducing general misery). The biggest losers will be the short-term profits of the fossil fuel industry and its investors. Provided there is effective policy to help us cross the bridge, such as a just transition for relevant industries, and measures to soften the blow of temporarily increasing prices as we transition off of fossil fuel technology, halt and reverse deforestation, and shift to regenerative agriculture, the rest of us will gain in every sense of the word. Using positive framing, the pandemic could get us communally energised to tackle climate change, to fill the uncertainty that has come to define the last few years with pursuit of a common goal – to overcome an existential crisis. In the sentiment of emerging green (new) deal policy proposals, the climate crisis allows us an opportunity to defeat other global ills, notably biodiversity loss, poverty, and gender and economic inequality. We know, as with COVID-19, that it won’t be easy, but that we will come out the other side happier, safer and more prosperous – as will the whole future of humanity. Moreover, we can hustle far, far faster than we have been told we can. Let’s get through this pandemic with our covid-tude, and during the next decade of struggle lying before us, let’s show some clima-tude.

The post From covid-tude to clima-tude (part 2/2) appeared first on Global Change Ecology.

This pandemic and the nature of our response to it, is unprecedented within our lifetimes. Affected societies have adopted a mode of solidarity and sacrifice towards achieving an explicit goal – mitigate and ultimately stop a novel virus, which threatens to overwhelm global society. Conceptually, one could take the last part of this sentence, replace ‘a novel virus’ with ‘climate change’, spread out the timeline and have it remain a meaningful statement.

It would be unrealistic to propose that we observe the same behaviour of isolating ourselves and press the hibernate button on economic activity. Instead, I am proposing that we all (emphasis on all) take seriously a threat that a different set of experts tell us is very real, is happening right now, and has a window of opportunity within which to act meaningfully.

The two crises are intertwined in at least one important way: given that climate change and biodiversity loss increase the risk of pandemic, COVID-19 stands figuratively as the smallest within a set of Russian dolls, nested inside the progressively larger dolls of global change (a term describing climate change, biodiversity loss, overhunting, altered biogeochemical cycles, invasive species and other planetary-scale changes caused by humans). Naturally, however, there are also fundamental differences between pandemics and climate change, perhaps the most obvious being that pandemics target the physiological health of our species, rather than directly undermining the basis of our livelihoods, security and well-being: ecosystems and the free services they provide, and the chemical and physical properties of the atmosphere, land and oceans. Pandemics are short-lived, even as their effects have lasting ramifications, while climate change is enduring and potentially irreversible. While the pandemic is primarily a public health crisis, climate change is a public health crisis and then some. Pandemics have immediate, visible effects – hospital beds filling up, running out of stock of ventilators and diagnostic kits, the race for vaccine development. Climate change occurs frame-by-frame and is difficult to tease apart from historically occurring phenomena: natural disasters, socio-political tensions, famine. Lastly, meaningful action on climate change involves systemic changes to infrastructure and institutions, permanent and deep change that not only deals with the crisis but gears the whole of our societies to be sustainable, so as to avert future crises.

However, similarities can be drawn, and lessons learnt. People have experienced firsthand that the world does not implode if our lifestyles change quite suddenly – even as the most vulnerable are having a hard time of it – and that we have the resources and flexibility to adapt. While the situation could not go on such as it is, and need not, what we can take from this experience is that the blueprints we have for our societies as they are now, are not set in stone. The economy would not wither if we don’t build that highway that shaves six minutes off average commuter times, and our life support system does not hinge on consumerism and indulgence. Many people can work and pay bills and communicate effectively and need not travel across the country or across continents to achieve the same results. We still go on breathing, living, nurturing and loving, albeit loving from a distance. Where governments are supporting the most vulnerable of their populations, everyone can still access the essentials – food, water, medicine, even online education. We feel united, as we would fighting climate change, knowing that our sacrifice is eminently worth it.

Changing our lifestyles in response to crisis measures, with the retention of what is truly important for our wellbeing, is possible. Psychologists tell us that beyond a minimum level of wellbeing, it is not our suite of behaviours or goods consumption in of themselves, but rather the fact that the society around us has access to them, that drives us to feel an associated sense of dependency. In other words, we have wiggle room in more ways than what we may have perceived we did, and perhaps our limits of satisfaction are largely delineated by how much our peers have. During the COVID-19 crisis, we are more satisfied being cooped up in our houses knowing that others are, too. Meaningful action on climate change, to the wealthy and well-off, may feel like a sacrifice – frequent holidays abroad, buying imported foods, owning an SUV. To most of the rest of us, our lifestyles would not change as much as we are led to believe by professional climate change deniers and their equally ugly metamorphosis, climate change minimisers. This industry, which has been core to influencing public perception, and the political lobbying industry which has stymied a transition off of fossil fuels, has been funded by the well documented and continuing flow of billions of dollars, courtesy the fossil fuel industry.

If the politics shifted meaningfully, it would mean the domino-like declarations of climate emergencies across countries. This would place us on a war-like footing, as the science tells us is now necessary. If societies were then required to make adjustments to their lifestyles, while keeping the fundamentals of what creates a good life, change may well be far more acceptable. Knowing it was vital not only to our children’s, but also to our own survival, and that we were all making adjustments together, could give us the same resoluteness we now possess in changing our behaviour to kill the virus. With targeted policy, there would not likely be real drops in quality of life, and even putting aside the value of a safe climate system, in many instances changes could directly improve wellbeing – riding a bike and beefing up your cardiovascular health, paying less for electricity with government support to install solar panels on your roof, growing food in your back yard as a family- or friend-based activity and a form of green exercise. This could be part and parcel of clima-tude, the attitude required not only to deal with a crisis, but to actively improve your own and others wellbeing in the process.

While the above examples are of a personal and community nature, clima-tude must permeate into the regional, national and international spheres. Individual lifestyle changes alone are simply insufficient. But individual and community action can help galvanise connections with like-minded individuals and organisations, and spur powerful, broad-based action (a marketing trick Greenpeace has been using). This process is reflected in the pandemic, where action scales from the individual, to local municipalities, and right up to international organisations such as WHO and the UN. Nothing less than a global effort is required to tackle both pandemics and climate change.

IPCC scientists definitively told us in 2018 that we have just a short window to address climate change, by now amounting to a fall in emissions of 7.6% per year between now and 2030, to stand a chance of limiting global warming to below a 1.5°C rise in temperatures. They tell us that this would require ‘‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’’. This threshold is regarded as the ‘safe limit’, even though millions are currently unsafe and dying because of climate change and coal pollution. We have the technological and financial resources to achieve this, but up until now have lacked the political will. In a well-functioning democracy, the electorate is the lever which generates this political will. A ruling party that fails in mobilising resources to fend off the spread of COVID-19, will fail in their re-election bid. The franchise, and other tools in our civic toolbox, are the most fundamental means we have in realising our collective power to deal with climate change. We will only be in this position for a limited period of time, and we have already seen the results of even a slight lag in confronting COVID-19. Will you be able to look back in 2035 or beyond, when widespread food and water shortages emerge, crises to make COVID-19 look tame, and say that you did everything reasonable in your power to help avert that situation? Perhaps the next decree to stay in our homes comes not due to a pandemic, but to wars that originate out of geopolitical tensions, driven by multiple, interacting climate change impacts. If pandemics can happen again, so can wars between blocs of countries, developed and developing.

Part 2 will follow soon.

The post From covid-tude to clima-tude (part 1/2) appeared first on Global Change Ecology.