Climate Change: B&P Approach

Biology & Policy Society’s Inaugural Event. We will discuss and ideate on Climate Change from the lens of Biological Reasoning.

Gradual long-term changes in weather and temperature patterns happen naturally. However, the term “climate change” refers to the unnatural rise in global temperature due to industrialisation. Even if we are able to achieve some level of control over our carbon emissions, the temperature would rise by 1.5℃ by 2050 and 3-4℃ by 2100. This will have disastrous consequences for humans including more extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, disturbances in agriculture, mass migrations due to rising sea levels etc.

We have the required technical knowledge on tackling climate change. We are now able to capture carbon from air and put it back into the ground. Renewable sources of energy such as solar are now generating energy cheaper as compared to highly polluting oil and coal. All these measures/technologies are already present and can be used to stop and reverse the rise in temperature. Yet, we are still not able to get people to act together and take mitigating actions against climate change.

How do we tackle this?

We at Takshashila want to supplement traditional public policy tools with “Biological Reasoning” i.e. insights from Biology, Evolution, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology and related disciplines to fight against climate change.

For instance, one of the possible ways to look at climate change is to take into account the instant/delayed gratification framework - A large population is unwilling to delay instant gratification and take the pain now (cutting energy consumption, putting resources into green technology) for their better future (delayed gratification). One of the reasons for this is that future outcomes are quite uncertain in nature and collective action is difficult if the results are uncertain. That is, given a good deal of uncertainty, it becomes hard to estimate how much one’s actions in the present can help reduce climate change in the future. Disseminating information which will help reduce this uncertainty is a good first step. Another solution for this is to communicate how this will affect their younger kins (kids, nephews etc).