'Tackling the 2 Cs: COVID-19 and the Climate Crisis – Insights from Behavioural Economics'

The immediate urgency of the coronavirus pandemic is causing many climate change advocates to wonder what our response to this public health crisis tells us about our ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The UK government’s own climate change advisors state that only 38% of emission cuts will come from technological change; the majority will need to come from societal and behavioural changes. What lessons do we have to learn and what insights does behavioural economics have to offer in rising to the challenge of these two crises?

The worldwide lockdown, which has seen approximately three billion people under some form of restriction, has led to global energy demand being predicted to fall by 6% (IEA, 2020), a decline seven times greater than that in the 2008 financial crisis. The most relevant question, really, is: will the lifestyle changes that facilitated this fall persist as government restrictions are lifted?

Will status quo bias - the preference for the current state of affairs – help these lifestyle changes stay in the long term? Aviation emissions may stay low for years as people prefer local tourism either to support local industries or avoid health risks.

However, once COVID-19 passes, carbon-intensive private transportation will pick up and, in a worst-case scenario, could even exceed pre-COVID-19 levels if fears of virus transmission hold people back from using public transport.

Lessons From Behavioural Economics

To derive behavioural lessons from the coronavirus pandemic for climate change mitigation, let’s consider how the two crises compare. The perceived ‘psychological distance’ between humans and climate change is a key difference to coronavirus, with the negative impacts of climate change being perceived as more distant in time, space and likelihood than coronavirus infection (Wang et al., 2019).

Several studies show this to have a negative correlation with public concern, yet a key driver for urgent, societal level change is increased public support and willingness to engage in individual climate action. The two crises also differ in three major psychological risk dimensions: perceived controllability, dread, and risk (Constantino et al., 2020) with climate change scoring higher in “perceived controllability” whereas COVID-19 elicits higher levels of dread (Fox-Glassman & Weber, 2016).

Yet both crises also exhibit several parallels. Firstly, the costs of delaying action are seriously underestimated for both crises (Kunreuther & Slovic, 2020); the danger being that while COVID-19 infections grow exponentially, the greenhouse gases driving global warming do so in complex and highly nonlinear ways that can result in tipping points.

Secondly, the delay in impact of any action or inaction makes it hard to learn from experience (Weber, 2020). Thirdly, the costs to reduce the severity of both crises are incurred now and for certain while the benefits accrue only in the future and with some uncertainty. As such, public perception of climate change as abstract, distant and with uncertain consequences undermines climate action.

So, What Does All This Mean For Climate Change Solutions?

Getting people to adopt behaviours that reduce costs for the environment requires a multifaceted approach. Four key objectives aligned with this goal serve as signposts: we need to get people’s attention, engage their desire to contribute to the social good, make complex information more accessible, and facilitate accurate assessment of risks, costs, and benefits (Yoeli et al., 2017).

As shown in Figure 1, many tools contribute to these objectives: from choice architecture interventions (e.g. establishing defaults, adapting frames, limiting options) to communication (e.g. giving timely feedback) and persuasion methods (e.g. utilising social norms, encouraging commitments). While getting people’s attention (the first objective) appears not to be an issue for COVID-19, it seems to be the case for climate change, given its much greater psychological distance. The other three objectives are equally useful to direct individual and policy responses to COVID-19.

Communicating social norms about social distancing rules and the wearing of face masks (tool 11) will be important as the economy slowly reopens (Weber, 2020). Since this behaviour is highly observable (tool 10), these individual behaviours will be enforced by society, however it is important to highlight the consequences people care about (tool 7), such as protecting their family from virus transmission, to effectively incentivise these behaviours.

Similarly, at the time of panic-buying, peer-generated and enforced norms of fairness and equity would have proved potentially more beneficial than individual store regulations (Weber, 2020). Social norms have also been found to lead to tipping points in behaviour (Nyborg, 2017) and so are proving popular as a tool to incentivise climate action.

Moving Forward

Tackling the long-term climate emergency will not come from shutting down the economy, as coronavirus has done, but from restructuring systems to enable people to live in a low-carbon way.  Understanding the possible link between psychological factors and support for climate action is therefore important since it may provide insights into ways in which climate change communicators can reduce the perceived distance, risk and controllability of climate change.

The existence of practical, cost-effective behavioural tools proves that behavioural economics can boost climate mitigation behaviour and can serve as a useful

complement to traditional regulations.

By Janina Gleed

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