Sir, – Bronagh Loughlin ("Eco-anxiety: 'I feel useless in the face of climate change'", Health + Family, December 3rd) writes with searing honesty about feeling terrified in the face of climate change.
Her feelings stem from two sources – knowledge of the damage we are inflicting on planetary ecosystems and a sense of helplessness to remedy the problem.
This mixture of high awareness and low efficacy is an effective riposte to anyone who contends that educating society about climate change (ie providing information to people) is sufficient to solve complex environmental problems.
Unless learning is accompanied by motivation to act and capability to respond, the anxiety so well illustrated in Ms Loughlin’s article is the most likely consequence for many across society.
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This eco-anxiety is a legacy of two decades of environmental policy that has focused on public engagement around behavioural change.
In the run-up to the signing of the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the UK government ran a marketing campaign that asked the question “Are you doing your bit?”. Its key message was that everyone needed to act to solve environment problems. However, since the target behaviours were routine, no-cost and easy to conduct – recycling, walking a bit more, installing energy-efficient lights, etc – the perceived impacts were relatively trivial. Two decades later, environmental problems have significantly worsened, as the 2020 Environmental Protection Agency report made clear.
What has changed in the past few years with a new discourse of climate emergency is a growing sense that radical transformations are required to solve environmental problems.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reckoned that the scale of response necessary to prevent harmful global warming is unprecedented in its extent and rapidity.
To this end, policy needs to encourage all citizens – including young people – to support and participate in structural change, not just behavioural change.
It is striking that the list of actions Bronagh Loughlin mentions does not include contacting her TD or supporting NGOs to campaign for policy or regulatory change.
Political representatives are unlikely to take the courageous steps that leadership on climate change requires if their constituents never mention the issue to them or if environmental NGOs are seen as representing only a small minority of society.
There is an important equity consideration to take account of. It is simply not the case that everyone in society has an equal role to play in responding to climate change.
A fair response to the climate problem begins with the recognition that some actors in society emit far higher amounts of carbon than others. It is not a level playing field.
This applies both to households with higher socio-economic status and large business organisations. For these, the scope for and necessity to act on emissions reduction is far greater.
For others, notably those living in fuel poverty or working in carbon-intensive industries, the focus should be on ensuring a decent standard of living in precarious times of change.
In a climate emergency, encouraging public response to environmental challenges as citizens, not just as consumers, should be a policy imperative. If done well, efforts to bring citizens directly into policymaking at local and national levels, in the form of citizen assemblies, can expand the possibilities for and legitimacy of structural change, ensure that new policies are fit for purpose, spill over into personal actions, and lessen the sense of eco-anxiety so eloquently described by Bronagh Loughlin. – Yours, etc,
Prof PATRICK
DEVINE-WRIGHT,
University of Exeter,
Devon, UK.