In perspective: What the pandemic says about our ability to fight climate crisis

To understand how the pandemic relates to climate requires us to look at certain overlapping behavioural science factors that have been linked to our inability to make the required, rational choices needed to address both these crises — climate change and the pandemic

A United Nations (UN) climate panel report released on August 9 warned the world of inevitable disruption from climate, and said that all actors need to act now to limit its worse impact. The deadly heatwaves, destructive cyclones and extreme weather events will only become worse if nothing is done. The report, an in-depth review of the science of climate crisis, used five possible scenarios to illustrate the actions that need to be taken, or the harms that will follow if they aren’t.

Representational image. (AFP)

Two of these relate to the path the world currently is on — economic growth is more distinctly the priority for the world at large, with the necessary sacrifices and adjustments that could help reduce emissions few and far in between.

The SSP2-4.5, described as a “middle of the road” scenario, is when emissions begin to fall around 2050 as socioeconomic factors follow historic trends with no significant shift. But growth and incomes become inequal as climate impact becomes more clear and by the end of 2100, the climate has warmed by 2.7C – well past the threshold of what is considered stable.

The next scenario, SSP3-7.0, tracks even closer to the world’s current emissions trajectory. In this, emissions keep rising steadily as countries demur from taking strong action. By the end of the century, average temperature has risen by 3.6C, with the impact far beyond control. In this case, the report warns, countries become more competitive and shift focus to national security and ensuring their own food security.

At the outset, these futures seem like the consequence of a world that is short-sighted in general and tribalistic at worst. The present globalised world, with interdependent trade and interconnected popular culture, may be better equipped to avoid either of these futures, or an even worse one where the world doesn’t only not act but makes emissions worse.

But, the clues from the present suggest that assumption could be dangerous. The Covid-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020 as a global crisis not seen since the era of globalisation began. No border has been left intact by the virus, which has torn through populations in rich and poor countries alike.

A year-and-a-half later, the pandemic looks different for different regions – particularly divided is the effect between the Global North and South. A large part of this relates to vaccine nationalism, wherein lies the traces of myopia and tribalism even when science has demonstrated that the only way out of the pandemic is inoculating the world. If the virus survives anywhere, mutating and evolving as it does in due course, no region is unsafe.

To understand how this relates to climate requires us to look at certain overlapping behavioural science factors – certain cognitive biases in particular — that have been linked to our inability to make the required, rational choices needed to address both these crises — climate change and the pandemic.

Insights about these biases are primarily drawn from an opinion piece in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and a research article in Springer, which relate to Covid-19. These are then compared with similar biases that researchers have established or spoken about in the case of the climate crisis.

Optimism bias

In the BMJ opinion, University College London neuropsychology professor Narinder Kapur highlights several cognitive biases – including optimism bias: “the view that adverse events are more likely to happen to others than to oneself”. This, he adds, “could be seen in the early stages of the pandemic, both in countries and in people within a country – with some western countries thinking that the pandemic would be confined to Asia, and people within a country underestimating the likelihood that they will catch the virus.”

Professor Geoffrey Beattie of the Edge Hill University in the UK and co-author of The Psychology of Climate change in 2018 reported the findings of a gaze tracking experiment that showed that people with a stronger optimism bias tended to skim over text when it related to climate and its negative impact but spent a longer duration on a section that casted doubts on climate crisis.

Similar to Covid-19, then, optimism bias appeared to predispose people into not recognising the climate crisis adequately as a problem that could affect them.

Status quo and present biases

In the Springer article, health economists from Iran’s Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences cover insights drawn from behavioural economics that help explain why people failed to make rational choices. Among these are status quo bias – a tendency for people to give disproportionate amount of preference to current options with an unwillingness to change actions – and present bias, in which people tend to favour immediate reward at the expense of long-term goals.

“Present bias is an explanation for why people do not behave in their own best interests and why they have difficulty adhering to preventive health behaviours such as social distancing, even when they wish to,” the researchers write. In the BMJ piece, Kapur says status quo bias may explain why some were less willing to improve pandemic preparedness even as the virus tore through early epicentres like China and Italy.

Present bias has been widely used in behavioural economics to explain something known as hyperbolic discounting. This is one of the strongest brain biases psychologists see as impeding the adequate response needed to tackle the climate crisis. In a 2010 working paper for Harvard Business School, faculty members Lisa L Shu and Max H Bazerman identify this as the first of three biases that impede sound individual decision on climate change. “…Despite claiming that they want to the leave the world in good condition for future generations, people intuitively discount the future to a greater degree than can be rationally defended,” they write.

Affect heuristics

Cognitive biases ultimately determine how we are affected. In case of crises, current or anticipated, these alter our threat perception. Affect heuristics refer to choices that people based on their current emotion, or in psychological terms, an “affect”.

For years, scientists have spoken about how affect heuristics dictate that climate crisis, as long as it is perceived as a distant problem not adequately evoking a strong emotion such as fear, the imperative to act on it will not be adequate. In a 2010 paper in the Journal of Global Ethics, Mark Seabright calls for more focus on the “personal and short term consequences” as a strategy to evoke stronger moral reactions to climate change.

In a 2017 technical document on how to improve trust in vaccination, the World Health Organization identifies affect heuristics as a factor in vaccine hesitancy. Here, it is spoken as much in the context of stressing on the need for people to take vaccines as it is on the care that must be given to mitigate the harms from negative information around vaccines – fear, a strong emotion (affect), could more readily fuel hesitancy.

In India, the opposite phenomenon took place in the summer this year when the devastating second wave in April-May triggered a rush for vaccine and for demands to open access to more age groups.

Egocentrism

The response to the pandemic was characterised by fear and urgency. But within these, the cognitive biases that impede sound decision-making were clear. Take, for instance, egocentrism, the third cognitive bias identified by Shu and Bazerman in the context of climate and that which explains vaccine nationalism.

Even though the WHO and its partners identified it as a future threat, the best effort to address this – the Covax Facility — was not adequate to overcome the problem. Even now, 16 months since the pandemic was declared, it has not been able to raise the target amount needed to purchase and distribute vaccine to poor countries.

What this means for the climate crisis

While vaccine nationalism may be a more headline problem, with comparatively more efforts to understand the factors at play, the cognitive biases recounted above demonstrate that the world needs to work around significant challenges to undertake the manner of collective action that the climate crisis demands.

Otherwise, we risk walking into the futures that the IPCC report warns us about in scenarios SSP2-4.5 and SSP3-7.0, even if we seem to be moved by the perils of climate change on the surface.

In Perspective takes a deep dive into current issues, the visible and invisible factors at play, and their implications for our future. The column is out every Monday