Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month on from Cop28, the world is further than ever to meet its collective climate goals. At the root of all these problems, according to recent research, is the human “behavioral crisis,” a term coined by an interdisciplinary team of scientists.
“We’ve socially engineered ourselves like we’ve geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper suggesting that climate degradation is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behavior.
“We need to be mindful of the way we are being manipulated,” said Merz, who co-founded the Merz Institute, an organization that researches the systemic causes of the climate crisis and how to tackle them.
Merz and colleagues believe that most climate “solutions” proposed so far only address symptoms rather than the root cause of the crisis. This, they say, leads to increasing levels of the three “leverages” of excess: consumption, waste and population.
They claim that unless the demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a band-aid. “We can deal with climate change and exacerbate overshoot,” says Merz. “The material footprint of renewable energy is dangerously under-discussed. These energy farms need to be rebuilt every few decades – they are not going to solve the bigger problem unless we address the demand.”
“Overshoot” refers to how much Earth’s human society uses to sustain itself – or grow. Humanity would currently require 1.7 Earths to maintain the consumption of resources at a level that could recreate the planet’s biocapacity.
Where discussion of climate often focuses on carbon emissions, a focus on surplus emphasizes the material use, waste production and growth of human society, all of which affect the Earth’s biosphere.
“Essentially, leftovers are a crisis of human behavior,” says Merz. “We’ve been telling people to change their behavior for decades without saying, ‘Change your behavior.’ We’ve been saying ‘be more green’ or ‘fly less’, but meanwhile all the things that drive behavior have pushed the other way. All these subtle cues and not so subtle cues were literally pushing in the opposite direction – and we wondered why nothing was changing.”
The paper examines how neuropsychology, social signals and norms have been exploited to drive human behavior that grows the economy, from consumption of goods to large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong to a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies to create behavior incompatible with a sustainable world.
“People are the victims – we have been exploited to the point that we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction,” says evolutionary behavioral ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. “Why not use it to build a truly sustainable world?”
Just one quarter of the world’s population is responsible for nearly three quarters of emissions. The authors suggest that the best strategy to counter excess would be to use the tools of the marketing, media and entertainment industries in a campaign to redefine our material-intensive socially accepted norms.
“We’re talking about replacing what people are trying to indicate, what they’re trying to say about themselves. At the moment our signals have a very high material footprint – our clothes are linked to status and wealth, their materials are sourced from all over the world, most are shipped to South East Asia and then shipped here, only to be replaced by next season’s trends. The things that people can attach status to are so fluid, we can replace them all with things that have essentially no material footprint – or even better, have an ecologically positive one.”
The Merz Institute runs an overshooting behavior lab where they work on interventions to address overshooting. One of these identifies “behavioral influencers” such as screenwriters, web developers, and algorithm engineers, all of whom promote certain social norms and can potentially work to re-threaten society relatively quickly and harmlessly by promoting a new set of behaviors.
The paper discusses the enormous success of the work of the Population Media Center, an initiative that creates mainstream entertainment to drive behavioral change on population growth and even gender violence. Fertility rates fell in the countries in which the center’s telenovelas and radio novelas were broadcast.
Population growth is a difficult topic to discuss given the not too distant history of eugenics and ethnic cleansing practiced in many nations around the world. However, Merz and colleagues maintain that it is important to confront the issue, as population growth has canceled out most of the climate gains from renewable energy and efficiency over the past three decades.
“It is honestly a question of women’s liberation,” says Barnard. “Higher levels of education lead to lower fertility rates. Who could possibly claim to be against educating girls – and if so, why?”
The team calls for more interdisciplinary research into what they called the “crisis of human behavior” and concerted efforts to redefine our social norms and desires that drive overconsumption. When asked about the ethics of such a campaign, Merz and Barnard point out that corporations are fighting for consumers’ attention every second of every day.
“Is it ethical to exploit our psychology for the benefit of an economic system that is destroying the planet?” asked Barnard. “Creativity and innovation drive overconsumption. The system drives us to suicide. It is conquest, entitlement, misogyny, arrogance and it comes in a smelly package that drives us to the abyss.”
The team is determined that solutions that do not address the underlying drivers of our growth-based economies will only exacerbate the surplus crisis.
“Everything we know and love is at stake,” says Barnard. “A habitable planet and a peaceful civilization both have value, and we need to be aware of using tools in ethical and justice-based ways. It’s not just about humanity. It’s pretty much every other species on this planet. It about the future generations.”
“I do get frustrated that people sit in paralysis and think, what should I do? Or what should we do? There are moral hazards everywhere. We have to choose how to intervene to get us as humanity working on a path forward, because everything is set right now to strip us of our humanity.”
