Environmental attitude
We have to talk about this. Currently, we are facing an environmental crisis in which Policymakers, Industries, and Citizens struggle to find their place. There are lobby's in place to change our perception and opinion, on issues such as climate change, pollution, or sustainability, by means of misinformation or manipulative greenwashing. Leading to anxiety, mistrust, and a loss of hope that we can ever revert the damage done to this planet.
Well, were to start right? This is a really hard one... Ok lets start by establishing the main connections between these three elements Policymakers, Industry, Citizens (Fig. 1).
In a resumed way, its hard to find a consensus between the three main stakeholders around environmental issues just by the fact that every action will lead to impacts, either if they are environmental, economical or social. Should be highlighted this scheme reflects the European Union perception and might not be applied elsewhere.
To specify some cases, significant progress was achieved with the polluter-pays principle, but also several developments on the level of green marketing, and environment activism seemed to thrive following an increase in environmental concerns over the last years.
Moreover, this pressure between three stakeholders is already established for some time, but now a new element as arrived, the urgency. The urgency of getting this planet into shape, as if we are talking about a diet, with specific deadlines, climate scenarios, catastrophic events, and worse... they are all true.
This put everybody into stress, because there is no possibility of procrastinating any longer in the implementation of new environmental protection laws. Which is then followed by adaptation difficulties from industries, either because they are not environmental enough or because they depend on these impacts (e.g. pollution) to create their income, but there is also a mixture of opinions among the citizens, clashing between the desire to have a more environmentally friendly world and incapacity to change consuming habits.
It is all very stressful, and I don't want to cause you any further anxiety.
Figure SPM.1 in IPCC, 2022: Summary for Policymakers [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, M. Tignor, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem (eds.)]. In: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, NY, USA, pp. 3-33, doi:10.1017/9781009325844.001
So what we need to do to get out of this conundrum?
Unfortunately I cannot give you a solution for all the environmental problems in the world, nor I can stop the current lobby's efforts in delaying implementation of environmental laws, because all problems need to have specific solutions. Nonetheless, I do have three key-messages to you:
What we can try to do, is to support all of those stakeholders (local, national) , evidencing that scientists are on their side, either to find a solution for any existing environmental problem, or to identify a novel and future problem (which will always exist in a greater or lesser extent). Scientists (know to be very smart), can also provide the tools for the most balanced decision-making.
What we can also do, is to convince all parts of negotiations to embrace change. Because if you don't change now, environmental pressures will force you to change in the future. Anticipation is key-aspect in climate adaptation, and we already got a glimpse of that during COVID pandemic.
In a discussion with the complexity level as this one, there is no 'right' and 'wrong' but rather 'gains' and 'losses', which result are often only observable in some years-time. Approaching the topic with a moderate posture, and avoiding polarizations, can allow significant actions to emerge.
Finally, the question that everybody do to themselves, 'Are we doing enough?'. I actually don't know, but we have a plan and we should try to follow it and continuously adapt it to the new realities. In what concerns our personal contributions to create a better environment, we shouldn't carry the weight of an entire world in our shoulders, but rather do what is in our reach to preserve the environment and be tolerant with others that did not took the same priorities as we did. If is in your reach, inspire others to prioritize environment protection in their daily life with small gestures.
Title Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash