WHY ARE WE FOCUSING ON CLIMATE CHANGE WHEN WE SHOULD BE FOCUSING ON BIODIVERSITY?
I asked my Linkedin connections to send me life and business questions. I wanted to improve my writing and only write about things that my network would find interesting. I do not have all the answers, I am trying to shine a light on them from my perspective and background. This is a starting point for a good discussion. Please join the conversation and contribute your thoughts and knowledge in the comments. Be respectful and curious, who knows what a simple question can lead to - for you and your business.
So far, this experiment has been fun, eye-opening and humbling for me. Having such passionate and wonderful human beings in my circle makes me jump out of bed every day. Thank you to everyone!
Mark Fitzpatrick asks
WHY ARE WE FOCUSING ON CLIMATE CHANGE WHEN WE SHOULD BE FOCUSING ON BIODIVERSITY?
He added, “The latter will fix the prior plus enable adaptation to climate change if we can't prevent it. Also, we can't forget about the importance of biodiversity in designing mitigations. Planting pine may provide short term sequestration but long term destroy our biodiversity. A focus on biodiversity would address water quality issues, fisheries etc.”
Scientists are not good at communicating (quoting Taylor Wilson here). They are good at being scientists. So to communicate their findings, to educate people on what they have discovered and what they would recommend us to do, they rely on media.
Canadian researchers looked into this:
“We found that media coverage of climate change was up to eight times higher compared to biodiversity. This discrepancy could not be explained by different scientific output between the two issues. Moreover, climate change media coverage was often related to specific events whereas no such indication of a connection was found in the case of biodiversity. An international communication strategy is urgently required to raise public awareness on biodiversity issues. We discussed several initiatives that scientists could undertake to better communicate major discoveries to the public and policy makers.”
(https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2017.00175/full)
Have a look at what they recommend too. I will continue with my personal viewpoint, a diversity of perspectives makes for creative solutions. Of course, the first thing why people do or do not do something, is knowledge. You cannot do something if you don’t know about it, so here we go back to the media coverage point. Until Mark posed this question, I thought a lot about climate change but never thought much about biodiversity.
When I first heard the question, my mind went straight into the next reasons, looking at the question based on the way our brains work.
TIME
Making people quit smoking is a challenge. We have nicotine patches, big ugly images on cigarette packages, forbid smoking in many public and social areas - all to help people to stop smoking. But it doesn’t work. A person who wants to smoke, will smoke because it gives them something pleasurable in the moment. A break from work, an elated feeling - RIGHT NOW. Since we have become experts in instant gratification and dislike waiting for anything, this is a big pull for our silly brains. Sure, I might get lung cancer or black rotten toes in 25 years time, but right now, I don’t see it, my toes are fine, it is too far away for me to feel scared. All I see is a break from work and a nice buzz right now. You have to make the future impact become real now, so that people understand, change and act now. If there was a toxin or explosive in one random cigarette per pack that would kill you immediately when you smoke it, people would stop. It would make the fuzzy danger of something in the future that our brain loves to ignore, real and imminent. I leave it to you to judge the ethics of that, haha!
EMOTIONS
When something becomes very personal it can bring up so much emotion, that it can support our decision making and helps us gain willpower. Most people start thinking about the future more when they become parents. They realize that everything they buy and do will impact their offspring in a few years.
I once did a first aid course and the health and safety trainer told a very interesting story. I am not sure if there is a study to it or if it was from his personal experience of training companies.
He said that builders would often not wear their helmets, for various reasons. Let’s say you run a building company. Not wearing a helmet could be fatal on a daily basis - but your team is guilty of that, how can you fix it? Just like with the example with the cigarettes, big posters of future accidents didn’t matter to the people. They just felt something strong NOW that made them skip the helmet (“oh, it is soo hot today, my hair looks funny, my helmet smells, etc” )
So you throw away the posters and move on to plan B. When they made people do exercises around a personal situation, they started wearing their helmets. How? First they went to the partners of those builders and included them in the plan. Then they gave the builders different tasks. One was, they had to go to the spouse of their colleagues and bring the message that their spouse was just killed on site, not wearing a helmet. Another one, they gave them a cane and made them tape their eyes shut for an afternoon. Why? To realize what the immediate impact of not wearing your safety glasses would feel like to you. Even just acting out a scenario like this made everyone reflect deeply on their eyesight, their partners and their children. Visualizing what it would be like if you were blind or got killed because you didn’t put on your protective gear, was working. Thinking about having your workmates knocking on your door and your crying family members did the trick. Make it personal.
Where does that leave us with climate change vs biodiversity?
Again, biodiversity is not (portrayed as) as close to me as climate change. If a tornado/flood/fire destroys my house, I care.
If a random frog or a tree that I never knew existed, dies out, I don’t care, because I have no emotions towards it.
My brain is not able to comprehend the impact over a long time. Back in the 90 they tried all sorts of things making people care about the arctic ice. But people don’t really care about polar bears that live far away in a place they have never been, with an impact they couldn’t feel. Make stuffed or 3D printed animals of all the ones we lost already in the local region. Put them on every street lantern, together with information what we lost and how it impacts our climate. See what happens.
Make it real. Make it right-now-in-your-face-big and hyper-personal.
Collab with your local supermarkets and set up a mock supermarket in an empty building in the inner city to do this kind of thing.
Get together with the leading people in your town and brainstorm to figure out real examples of local biodiversity. Then, give people actionable, small, immediate steps to DO SOMETHING SMALL NOW.
Make it fun and rewarding to act on it.
You could collaborate with schools and let the kids grow fancy heirloom seeds. Then they can sell the seedlings or the produce as fundraisers. Food brings people together, have a public teen cook off show at the best restaurant in town. Homegrown purple carrot noodles are so much cooler than overcooked spaghetti from a can. You could challenge the local arts school to go on photo hunts, documenting how many different bugs and butterflies they can find. Encourage them to breed a particular rare or endangered type of frog/algae/flower/etc.
This way, people start a personal connection and it makes them value and care for those special ones. People will even email trees if you let them! Make your local cinemas show great and encouraging movies around the topic. Make it simple, easy, doable and fun. Get those emotions in there.
REWARD
You need to celebrate and reward people, otherwise again, why should they care?
So go and have a fun staff competition, who has the most variety of food in their lunchbox or who has the coolest vege garden. Reward them.
Let the council dedicate a slot on their homepage to honour local businesses who work so hard to maintain biodiversity. Those once a year award gala dinners are not effective at all. Cheer and clap, promote and show off the good stuff, then people will want to join the party. We are tribal creatures, so go and create some good/positive peer pressure here. Get social media influencers involved, focus on the benefits and what we can do now, here, locally. Making it all about doom and gloom and far away polar bears is not going to reach our hyper distracted, instant satisfaction society.
Thank you so much Mark Fitzpatrick for asking this question. You educated me and I loved looking at the topic from a psychological angle.