Why we need to change how we talk about climate change | Kris De Meyer | TEDxLondon

Transcriber: Gustavo Ramos Reviewer: Quan Nguyen All right. Thank you. So I'm going to start by asking you some questions.

So my first question to you is on a scale from 0 to 10, how much do you care about climate change from not at all to very very much. Excellent. Those responses are coming in fast.

So let's look at the results. Wow, look at that. So high.

You’re all here for a reason. You’re in good hands today. You’re gonna have a awesome time.

So let’s look at the second question. How much concern, worry, fear or anxiety do you feel about climate change? Again, on a scale from 0 to 10, from none to very, very much.

Okay. So let's have a look at those results again. All right a bit a bit wider spread than before.

Still quite on the high side right. Okay. So for the next question I would like you to keep your phones to hand.

Don't put them aside yet, but I first would like you to take some time to think of a moment in the past when you try to take an action because of climate change, but you were unable to complete it. Think about what your action was, the reason that you couldn't carry it out, and how that made you feel. And I'll give you a little bit of time to think in your own minds to to find an example of that.

Wow, that must have been the first time there was silence on a Ted stage. Okay, so I hope you all found an example. What I would like you to do next now is to type in the mental meter.

How did this moment make you feel? A word or a couple of words that capture your feelings in that moment. Look at those responses coming in.

It looks like there's a very, very big winner in the middle. So let's look at those results there. Frustrated and powerless and helpless in disappointment.

My gosh, what misery! I've never seen so many negative emotions together as on that screen. This is the the dictionary of the negative emotions.

Okay, so why did I just ask you those questions? I'm a neuroscientist, and I'm on a mission to change how we think about and act on climate change. And these questions are super relevant to that mission.

Let's look at the reasons that you had for why you couldn't do what you wanted to do. It's very, very likely that it's one of two types of reasons. The first type of reason that could have gotten in the way is the system.

The system didn't allow you to do what you wanted to do. Either something didn't exist or it was too expensive, or you didn't know how to do it, and you just didn't have the time to figure it out. The second reason I hear a lot is other people.

Other people got in the way or they didn't want to play along what you wanted to do. Now let's take a step back and look at all of the results together that you gave here. Despite those very high levels of care and concern about climate change, many of you can think of examples of moments in the past where that care and concern did not translate into action, where something got in the way.

And you're not alone in this. Here in this room. This is not unique to us.

Let's have a look at public opinion about climate change at large. This is data from Ipsos Mori, and since 2005 they have been asking people, how concerned are you about climate change now? There's lots of ups and downs on this figure.

And I could talk about this for hours about why this is happening, and I'm not going to do that. But I want to draw your attention to this part here between 2013 and 2014 and then towards 2019, 2021, there's that massive increase in concern about climate change. It's a 60% in 2013, and then it's 25% higher in 2019.

Now on the surface of that, that that looks like a good thing, right. Like more concern about climate change might mean that perhaps we start doing something about this. But on occasion, Ipsos Mori also asks people, what are you willing to do on climate change?

And this is one of those results. This is people's willingness to take action on climate change, on a number of different types of actions. And it's comparing the responses from 2014 with the responses from 2020.

The light green bars are responses from 2014, and the dark green ones are responses from 2020. And despite over that same period of time, concern going up by 25% . There's barely any movement in people's willingness to take action.

So concern is going up and willingness to take action is flatlining over that same period. Now that's even only willingness to take action. It's not actual action that people are taking.

And we know from other research that there often is a very big gap between what people say they are willing to do and what they're actually doing in real life. So that gap between concern and action is even bigger than what we're seeing here in this data. So all of this together, your own examples of getting stuck.

And then this public opinion data pose a very big challenge to the idea that if only we get people to care about climate change, then they will do something about this. This is an idea that I hear so often that I call this the conventional wisdom about behavior change. That conventional wisdom is wrong.

Unfortunately, if we don't know how to overcome the barriers that we perceive in the system and other people, then no amount of caring more can lead to doing more. Psychologists have a word to describe the situations where we do know how to do something. It's called agency.

Knowing how to do something. To understand agency, just think of doctors and nurses on the floor of an emergency department because of their training and their professional expertise. They instinctively and intuitively know how to deal with that endless stream of emergencies that is coming through the door.

Here. There is a person having a heart attack over there. Someone is bleeding heavily.

They just know how to respond to that. Now, if you put me as a layperson without any medical training on that floor in the hospital, I'll be running around like a headless chicken. I would not know what to do in that situation.

And the problem is that when it comes to climate change, most of us are like the headless chicken. Most of us are like the lay person on the floor of an emergency department. We don't have the agency to deal with the emergency.

Now, that lack of urgency plays out differently for everyone in society at the Climate Action Unit. We work with people in a lot of different professional settings in politics and government, in business and finance, organizations, in the media. And what we hear a lot from people is where they say, I know how serious the situation is, but I don't really know how I could be doing more.

That even applies to politicians and people in business. The ones that many of you in the room might think should be leading on this. The weirdest place where I ever heard this was amongst a group of millionaires.

They said, what can we do? There's not that much we can do. We're not billionaires.

So many of us feel stuck, and those feelings of being stuck lead to a lot of ducking, of responsibility. We point a finger, we say it's those people over there that need to do something first to solve the crisis. So people are wanting governments to lead.

Governments are looking at businesses to change. Businesses are waiting for consumers to change their buying behaviour, and everyone is waiting for everyone else to act first. So what do we do about this mess?

How do we break out of this cycle, where increasing amounts of care and concern are not leading to the change that is required? Luckily, there's an alternative. We need to flip around the conventional wisdom and realize that in reality.

The arrow points from action to care. In real life, actions drive beliefs far more often than beliefs driving action. It's doing something that changes our beliefs, our understanding and awareness of the world.

And once we start doing something about an issue, the more we do, the more we start caring about this. One of the reasons why it works that way is when you do something for the very first time, you often get some feedback from the world around you. So either you discover that this this lack of confidence that you had, that that is actually misplaced and that you really can be doing this thing that you didn't know you had in you, or you get some feedback from people around you who say, you know, that thing you did that's really very, very good.

And so the more we start thinking about this, the more we take these actions, the more we learn about our ability to make change happen. And that that makes the next action also possible for us to identify. We start to see how we can be doing more, and that that means that action starts to inspire further action and eventually leads to the development of real agency, like the doctors and nurses in the emergency department.

Now you all have examples of this in your own life, perhaps outside of climate change, where you started to do something, and simply by starting that doing, you discovered what it was that you could be doing next. So how do we apply this recipe at scale? How do we collectively get ourselves unstuck so that we can stop pointing the finger at each other and waiting for other people to act first?

There are two ways of doing this. The first one is that we need to start creating opportunities for doing a wide range of them, across all of the areas in life where we know things need to change. And then we need to start doing them.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. According to an old Chinese proverb. So in order to go on that journey, you just have to take that first step.

The second way that we can apply. Action inspires. Action is by telling stories of doing, telling stories of action.

And one of the reasons, or the main reason why this is so important is because of something that psychologists call social learning. Most of our own agency comes from seeing other people solve a problem. My favorite example of that is Greta Thunberg.

In 2017, she saw students in Florida after a school shooting take to the streets, and she said to herself, if they can do that on the school shooting, then I can do this about climate change. And so she went and sat in front of the Swedish parliament, and the rest is history. So even Greta's action was inspired by the actions of other people, even outside of that domain of climate change.

And then once she took that action, she inspired lots of other people to. And that's really what we need to do with these stories of action. We need to create that sense of if they can do it, then so can I.

And that's across all areas in society where we know that something needs to change. So it's for the politician who discovers for the first time how they can do something. It's for people in business and finance organisations.

It's for our millionaires who are feeling powerless at the moment. It's for civil servants, for engineers, for lawyers, for journalists, for people working in the media, for teachers and farmers. Every time one of us discovers how to do something for the first time, we need to tell that story so we can motivate other people to.

And that's not the same as telling people what to do. It's not saying, well, because I now discovered how to do this, you have to do this too. No, instead of that, it's telling people the story that helps them to understand how to make the change happen.

So here you really can tell your own journey of discovery. You can say, at first I didn't know how to do this, but then I took this first step and I figured out what the next step was and the next one. And then I got a bit stuck.

But I found a way around it, and eventually I managed to achieve this really big thing that I never thought I could be doing. So when it comes to how we tell stories about climate change for ourselves and for other people, we need to start to create the recipes and cookbooks of climate action, the stories that help us to understand how to make that change possible. And once we start doing that, we will start changing climate change from or our perception of climate change from this big scary thing that's paralyzing us into something that collectively, all of us together know how to do something about, will be able to develop the collective agency to deal with the emergency.

Thank you very much.