A Rapid Departure from Incrementalism

How does big, meaningful change happen in the real world? The answer is actually really important for how we respond to and anticipate climate change. And how we communicate about, implement, and mainstream resilience.

Most of what we hear is incrementalism: gradual adjustments, building over time. A nudge here and a gentle adjustment there. Some capacity building and training. A new tool to fill a specific gap. Incrementalism is also how most of us picture climate change over time, a bias which is compounded by policy discussions about a 1.5° versus a 2° world or in hearing that sea-level rise between 2018 and 2019 was 6 mm. When I speaking in public, I normally use the language of incrementalism, which feels safer, even comforting.

My suspicion — and mostly my experience — is that most change actually occurs through fast, sudden shifts. An institution resists making a big change…until it doesn’t anymore. Super-typhoons are rare, until they aren’t.

I’ve seen pictures of New York City in 1910, with streets full of horses and carts, and then the same place 10 years later, with one horse and lots of early automobiles. Technology can facilitate these kinds of sudden changes, but really the changes are in our heads — how we see the world and our relationship to it. Technology is just the symbol of the change itself. And often that change is unidirectional and irreversible.

I’ll tell you a secret too, that many scientists share but don’t discuss much: climate change is not gradual either. We have pretty detailed models of earth’s climate over the past few 10 million years, with high resolution for the past few hundred thousand years. Climate shifts look like a lot of little changes, and then we pass either a threshold of lots of accumulated impacts or the climate lurches suddenly into another state. In either case, we see short transitions (a few years or a decade or two) and then something plateau-like again. Paleo-ecology tells us the same thing about ecosystems too: places seem stable and fixed, then get jumbled and shuffled rapidly.

Why does this discussion matter? We’re in a major institutional and policy jumble right now. A series of violent climate-driven events (such as fires in South America, North America, and Australia; an overactive Atlantic cyclone season), powerful political tensions in many countries, and the Covid-19 pandemic are forcing us to look at ourselves and our vulnerabilities with unfamiliar eyes. We’re reshuffling. Right now.

I won’t weigh in on where we are with climate impacts themselves, but many institutions are in the heat of the transition process, with a lot of sudden change. Not all of this change is useful or effective (and many of the political responses are arguably retrograde). But this is a good time to be mindful that our chaos is somewhat predictable, that this is a good time to support processes that we need (such as assessing systemic risks, as well as the value and relevance of the NDCs for the Paris Agreement), and that we should be in a better place on the other side. Indeed, on that other side, we should be better prepared for the additional climate impacts to come.

Godspeed to reaching the other side quickly and safely.

John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA