Why public servants have set the bar too low to tackle the climate crisis

This post is written by George Elerick, behavioural scientist and social psychologist, Nudge Culture

• **The problem: **Our lack of ambition holds back attempts to tackle climate change.
• Why it matters: The climate crisis is one of the biggest issues facing our planet.
• The solution: Bold thinking and setting high standards is needed.

In all aspects of life, there is a direct tendency to underestimate social or even personal circumstances. Everything from how long it takes to get to work through a long parade of traffic, or how long bureaucratic processes take to make tangible changes across society – the research shows this one singular commonality: we are blinded by a suite of cognitive biases that keep us from assessing reality as it is.

The most recent IPCC Report shows this to be explicitly true. Large-scale reductions are necessary to reduce the impact of a much faster warming effect across the globe due to a consistent proliferation of greenhouse emissions.

Organisations and public servants need to build and scale up workplace cultures that prize humility and communitarian approaches to responsibility.

The report also shows that “emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of warming since 1850-1900, and finds that averaged over the next 20 years, global temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5°C of warming. This assessment is based on improved observational datasets to assess historical warming, as well progress in scientific understanding of the response of the climate system to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.”

The key takeaway is that we have underestimated human impact. This alone implies that humans have been too comfortable with our assessment of our overall carbon footprint and activity. It also demonstrates the cumulative influence of human choice and our impact on the environment.

So, why do we underestimate social or personal circumstances so easily without question? How could this knowledge help those in public service, and how can organisations apply these insights? To respond to these relevant and timely enquiries, we must understand the power of temporal biases on how we tend to be unaffected by large-scale fear-based statistics.

Nudging and biases

The Dunning-Kruger Effect has been studied at the level of human experience. It’s one of the more popular biases that many of us have and are not aware of it, which is really at the heart of the bias itself. However, to understand the full impact of this bias, we have to accept that biases can affect society as a whole, in the form of a social contagion. Normalising certain ways to act also has a detrimental impact to human and organisational progress. What is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

“The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which the incompetent lack the skills and cognitive abilities to recognise their own inability.” At the heart of this bias is a lack of personal or corporate awareness. It really does have to do with the way a culture organises itself and if humility plays a role in that process at all.

Public servants, government organisations and those responsible for culture building need to be aware of this to create direct responses to the normalised temptation to think we are better off than we really are.

However, we as a species do not do well with the in-your-face alarmism. Public servants instead need to reinvent ways to address the real world issues. People get fatigued with world-ending apocalypse scenarios, especially if the culture you originate from has trained you to think we can beat anything and everything. Organisations and public servants need to build and scale up workplace cultures that prize humility and communitarian approaches to responsibility. The age-old hierarchical approaches to public servant leadership will not help – in fact, it might have contributed to where we are ecologically.

The next steps

Public servants should take seriously the role of creating think tanks (that turn into incubators) where practical onsite steps can be directed to all employees, bureaucratic processes, and even solidified through socially-aware rewards. Another bias public servants can use is social proof – we look to other people to discover how we should template our choices and behaviours. The way we can create new cultures is to look to leaders in your organisations to produce more leaders who generate mimetic behaviors for others to follow.

What about the regional impacts of climate change? Can we universalise a one-size-fits-all approach to global warming? What can we learn from the report about how to address contextualisation?

Some of the direct impact events include impact on water flows and sea levels. Some of these are impacted by the use of fossil fuels and its aggregate effects through emissions. What public servants, governments and relevant organisations can do is ask much harder questions about what it believes about the need to be honest about human involvement through day-to-day choices. Tools like surveys, interactive lunch talks and so on are a great start but can quickly turn into trends that lead to nowhere. Actionable steps need to be taken. Creating a culture of accountability is primary. Part of a culture-building practice could include incentivising team-working scenarios where employees, officials and organisations look to develop an ongoing community that keeps everyone working together toward agreed upon climate goals. These simple but effective goals also give the overall sense of a common direction fueled by a common passion.

If anything, these regional statistics in the IPCC illustrate that we need more context and less universalisation in how solutions are deployed.

Seeing the future enacted

The way we understand time also has a direct impact on how we make decisions as humans. Previous research has shown that we all rely on certain temporal biases. “People are less confident in success when events draw near than they are at a more distant time”. In simple terms, we think we are better equipped when we have a lot of time to prepare. The opposite is equally true. So, for public servants this means to address these issues, people will want to have a tangible game plan.

Abstraction and idealism are not great strategies to use to get people on your side or to get culture to change. Organisations need to apply these findings to inform their process on how a step-by-step approach can be successfully engaged with. People will otherwise shut down – some could say this is why climate change has been controversial on a social level.

If anything, the IPCC report has indicated that what we have been doing is not effective. We, along with our cognitive biases need to be put in check. However, we can no longer afford to speak in vague generalisations. We need to create radical communities who are willing to work together to form long-term strategies that not only inspire but also give public servants and organisations a real world strategy that will help address the climate issue and reduce the overall human impact on global warming. Our future depends on it. — George Elerick

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