The climate action paradox
April 21, 2025
I recently attended an interesting event: Science and improv, an effort to merge science with culture, and a different way of communicating. The topic was the climate policy paradox, with a short lecture given by Dr. Niklas Harring, from the University of Gothenburg. He raised a point that I had not previously thought about.
Overwhelmingly, people across the world seem to be concerned about the climate , irrespective of age, gender and education level. But when policy changes are made, people typically do not agree with them. According to a study in Nature Climate Change Bergquist et al., 2022 , the reason for this cognitive dissonance (if that is it?), is an issue of fairness. Not, what I had thought before which was that the issue was level of awareness or the rate-limited nature of climate change (it is not directly affecting us all right now in an explicit way like a hurricane would). I had thought, if only people understood the magnamity of the issue they would be willing to change. Not so, says the data.
The largest factor predicting people’s want to conform with climate related policay changes is related to fairness. So, the conversation changes then to what is fairness? Who can it be defined? In many ways, depending on perspective. This may be the crux of the problem. This behaviour may by typical of Tragedy of the Commons.
The tragedy of the commons refers to a situation in which individuals with access to a public resource — also called a common — act in their own interest and, in doing so, ultimately deplete the resource.
So the conversation should be shifted, away from convincing people of the urgency of the problem, e.g. “do you understand how your grandchildren will suffer/ animals will go extinct/ life will become more extreme/ innocent people will die?”. To a conversation about fairness.
No matter where you live in the world, your wealth, your class, your level of consumption, indepdendent of your historical contribution to carbon emissions, we are all affected by climate change. But how can we collectively take action?
Looking a bit deeper, we find different types of fairness. Distributional fairness - e.g. are resources distributed equally?, procedural fairness - e.g. were people able to participate in decision making regarding climate policies, and interactional fairness - e.g. the degree to which people affected by a decision are treated with dignity.
Where to with this information? As an oceanographer, and thus by default a climate scientist, I am thinking about how we may change our communication strategy to support the implementation of climate policies across the world. Is it in trying to understand where and which aspects of fairness are not being addressed by our world’s leaders regarding climate?