"Tilting the system?" Meaningful Climate Action

In January 2019, the UCL Policy Commission on the Communication of Climate Science (CCSPC) assembled 30 people from a variety of professional backgrounds but all with extensive experience of working on climate change. The aim of the meeting was to uncover better answers to a question that concerned citizens increasingly ask: “What can I do about climate change?”

I am sharing some interesting insights from the monthly CCSPC meeting:

Hannah Knox

Associate Professor of Anthropology

Director of Centre for Digital Anthropology

Editor of "Materializing the Digital" A Book Series from Manchester University Press https://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/materializing-the-digital/

"I have been reflecting a lot on what kind of assumptions are built into our ideas about climate action - particularly temporal assumptions about action having linear causal effects rather than it being part of a process of participating in complex feedback loops. Just as climate science has become able to understand climate as a system of eco-systemic relations and knock-on effects, so too I've been wondering about how action might need to be conceived/approached more explicitly in terms of an intervention in eco-systemic processes rather than in terms of a more mechanistic cause/effect process. Rather than asking/telling people what they can do, and trying to quantify doing in terms of effect (ultimately a Sisyphean task) climate change would seem to demand different mode of understanding action - action not as calculative, not a zero sum game, but instead as an intervention that has the potential to shift the system into a new state. In contrast to the current meaning of action that seems so often to lead to paralysis, I see evidence of this alternative form of acting in things like: performance art, co-production, climate strikes, pilot policy programmes, urban experiments. Whether or not these actually 'work' is a moot point - as forms of action they at least offer a way of getting out of the paralysis of inaction and create a more generative learning space which doesn't just respond to the world as it is, but in the course of bringing them into being 'reassembles' the world (a la Bruno Latour) both conceptually and practically."

Prof Chris Rapley CBE

University College London

Department of Earth Sciences

"The human Mk1 brain is primed to think in terms of cause and effect: e.g; I kick the ball and it moves - (also the corollary - If the ball moves I look to see who or what kicked it).

The framing became formalised in Newton’s laws of motion: we (physicists) isolate an object, take the vector sum of forces acting on it and calculate mathematically how it will move as a result.

This exposes the fundamental difference between physics - which isolates elements of the real world so that modelling them is tractable - and ecology, which attempts to address systems as a whole, including all the complex feedback loops, event cascades and nonlinear interactions - which is much more difficult and generally only tractable through the use of digital computers.

One of the ‘big Ahas’ in y science career was in the early 80s when I came across the paper attached by Jay Forrester originally published in 1971: The Counter-Intuitive Behaviour of Social Systems.

It was a revelation, and triggered a powerful feeling of “yes that’s right!"

He starts by saying; "The human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave. Social systems belong to the class called multi-loop nonlinear feedback systems. In the long history of evolution it has not been necessary until very recent historical times for people to understand complex feedback systems. Evolutionary processes have not given us the mental ability to interpret properly the dynamic behavior of those complex systems in which we are now imbedded."

(Also " The social sciences, which should be dealing with the great challenges of society, have instead retreated into small corners of research. Various mistaken practices compound our natural mental shortcomings. Computers are often being used for what computers do poorly and the human mind does well. At the same time the human mind is used for what the human mind does poorly and computers do well. Furthermore, impossible tasks are attempted while achievable and important goals are ignored.”)

He goes on to provide examples where intuitive (cause-effect based) actions to address problems in society generate unanticipated perverse consequences - which he then demonstrates can be understood when the system is analysed as a whole.

If we are to trigger a transformation of the world (power generation, infrastructures, economic system, political system, governance, behaviours) we have to confront the system in all its glorious complexity.

Isolating a piece (eg; ball to kick) - and then kicking it, even if it’s a powerful component, isn’t going to achieve the goal alone (and this is what I have been using our domain diagram for - to isolate elements and focus on kicking them in an insightful manner).

But tilting the system so that it will with a slight push reorganise itself holds out hope."

I have been appointed as a lay member of this Commission, and I offer input to critique the approaches used to summarise the findings and gaps that the meeting brought to light, and reflect on ways forward. The above discussion is an example of building on the climate conversation- an emerging idea about providing different responses to “So what can I do about climate change”, increasingly more sophisticated and audience-engaging, explaining things in different ways....