Current global climate action is starkly insufficient. Across the world, government plans leave the planet way off course for limiting temperatures to 1.5°C, with gaping chasms between what governments say they will do, the policies being made and the implementation of these policies.
The First and Second World Wars, the Great Depression, the AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic are all global crises which governments have responded to urgently with both public behavioural interventions and critical structural changes.
What then, can we learn from previous crises about what a truly urgent response to climate change should look like?
Engaging the public
Public information is often used in crisis situations. In the COVID-19 pandemic, public information has supported behaviour change and sometimes helped to avoid more invasive restrictions by encouraging voluntary action.
UK public information films from World War Two covered surprisingly climate-relevant topics such as insulation, energy efficiency, reuse and recycling and local food production. Likewise, in the fight against AIDS across the world, public information has been the most effective when it acknowledged that, though change can be difficult, it is also vital for our future.
Where, by comparison, is meaningful information around the public’s role in tackling climate change? The Glasgow Work Programme on Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE), one of the less trumpeted outcomes from COP26, calls for the promotion of transformative climate change action through citizen education, engagement and empowerment, with the right of access to information and participation in decision-making being key.
Despite the focus on the role of citizens in the ACE, the current strategies of rich countries tend to rely on innovation rather than transformative societal change. The public are encouraged to wait on unproven technologies and untested processes rather than being empowered to translate their climate concern into meaningful individual action. When initiatives to drive public engagement on climate change have happened, they have tended to focus only on the ‘win-wins’, such as recycling, avoiding thornier but more impactful issues such as reducing meat and dairy consumption and air travel.
Net Zero pledges and recycling campaigns give the public the impression that leaders have everything under control when this is far from the case. To achieve our climate goals, widespread behaviour change is needed, and if it is to happen, structural change will need to accompany it.
Reducing demand and consumption
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that swift and significant behaviour change is possible. COVID-19 lockdowns, for example, had the short-term side-effect of crushing rates of unsustainable behaviour such as air travel, food waste, commuting by car and fast fashion consumption. Similarly, in the UK during the Second World War, demand for resources was moderated through the use of coupons for food, clothing and fuel.
The idea of rationing emissions to tackle climate change and level individual use of global resources is not new but it is challenging for those in rich countries. In 2009, UK think-tank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), commissioned carbon budgets in the form of wartime ration books where coupons covered activities such as drying your hair, buying a t-shirt or having a bath.
The NEF’s ration books were shocking in illustrating just how drastically life would need to change to stay within a fair carbon budget. Recent research by the Center for Global Development (CDG) has reiterated this, finding that that in a single day, the average US citizen is responsible for the total annual emissions of someone from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Reforming global financial institutions
Global economic structures support unending growth, which currently, also promotes unending environmental degradation and climate change.
Precedent for the transformation of global economic structures to prevent future crisis can be seen in the wake of the Second World War. The Bretton Woods conference of 1944 consciously reshaped the global economic order with the aim of averting future threats to peace and fostering economic growth and stability. The summit led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which remain ‘influential proponents and enforcers of economic and development policies.’
Since 2008, there have been calls for ‘a new Bretton Woods.’ In 2019, outgoing UN Sustainable Energy for All chief and former World Bank vice president, Rachel Kyte, called for ‘a new generation of institutions’ to reshape multilateralism and ‘align all public investments with climate action.’ Public engagement with such a transformation is needed to help ensure that transitions to sustainability are just and fair for all.
Using subsidies for positive change
At COP26, US Special Envoy for Climate Change, John Kerry, described fossil fuel subsidies as the ‘definition of insanity’ supporting, as they do, the very activities we most need to change. Agricultural subsidies, too, promote resource-hungry, carbon-intensive meat and dairy production and consumption, actively working against diets that are both healthy and sustainable. Meanwhile, during COP26, the UK government unveiled new subsidies for domestic flights, while rail fairs continued to climb.