16 January 2024 – An interdisciplinary group of scientists has released a new paper, in which they analyse the root cause of the climate crisis. And it’s not carbon emissions, but a human behavioural crisis.
It was seen as a huge success when the COP28 Agreement included a commitment of the world leaders to transition away from fossil fuels. While the agreement wasn’t as strongly worded as many would have wanted, it was nonetheless a step in the right direction.
However, an interdisciplinary team of scientists from all over the world have now said that the root cause of the problem is a “human behavioural crisis”. And most of the measures that we have come up with so far, such as reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, only deal with the symptoms of the climate crisis.
Unless we can fundamentally change human behaviour, we don’t stand a chance to avert a climate catastrophe.
Human Behaviour Causes Ecological Overshoot
The study says that the climate breakdown is caused by ecological overshoot. This means we humans use the Earth’s resources to sustain and grow our society.
Overshoot is used to describe our overuse of these resources. At the current level, we would need 1.7 Earths to sustain the way we live.
This ecological overshoot is responsible for global warming, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, etc. In short, it’s the reason for climate change.
However, the team of scientists claims in their paper that the ecological overshoot itself is only a symptom of human behaviour, which is the real root cause of the problem.
There are three drivers that boost this overshoot: consumption, waste and population. And they are all rooted in human behaviours.
And because we don’t tackle human behaviour, the solutions we do have won’t make the big change we need. One good example is recycling.
Governments and world leaders all over the world put a lot of money and effort into creating recycling facilities. We, as consumers, have been told that recycling is essential to reduce our waste problem.
However, this only deals with a symptom, namely the amount of waste we have to deal with. But the root cause of the problem is that we produce this waste in the first place.
And what we would have to do to solve the problem once and for all is to consume less. But this would mean changing a behaviour that is central to our consumerist society.
“Human Behavioural Crisis” Is Man-Made
But the study doesn’t just point at the real cause of the problem. It also suggests that the “human behavioural crisis” has been created by ourselves.
Bluntly, driven by growing our economies and making money, we have manipulated ourselves into consuming more and adopting behaviours that lead to ecological overshoot and with that to climate change.
Neuropsychology, social signalling and norms have all been used to direct our behaviour into a certain direction: to grow the economy. To achieve this, marketing strategies use age-old drivers to get us to consume more.
Our need to belong or desire to attract a mate are all exploited by ad campaigns to make us buy more things or have larger families. And these methods are the reason why the call for “becoming green” has not yielded any changes.
For decades we’ve been telling people to change their behaviour without saying: ‘Change your behaviour.’ We’ve been saying ‘be more green’ or ‘fly less’, but meanwhile all of the things that drive behaviour have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction – and we’ve been wondering why nothing’s changing.
Joseph Merz, Lead Author of Study
The study suggests using the same methods and strategies to change human behaviour to create a sustainable world.
Our Opinion
I have to say, I’m not surprised that human behaviour is the root cause of the problem. And even less am I surprised that the “human behavioural crisis” is man-made.
We have created a consumerist society where having more is better. And this materialism makes us use things, such as cars, clothes, etc, as status symbols.
While it’s probably not possible to remove this need for status symbols, after all this part of being human, we need a shift. We need to change what these status symbols are.
At the moment, everything is focused on things that have an ecological negative impact, such as clothes, electronic gadgets and cars. If we can replace these with things that have a positive ecological impact, we could solve the climate crisis.
For example, it should be a status symbol to have a wildlife garden, rather than a manicured lawn that is void of all life. Wearing the same clothes for years and repairing them should be what the cool people do.
Walking and cycling to places should be seen as the societal norm, rather than driving everywhere. It’s a huge shift, but it’s possible.
