August Policy Newsletter

This week I was listening to the On the Media podcast about how traditional journalists interact with different types of problems. The commenter was focused on climate change as a relatively unique threat to how we as a species assess and consider risk, and how traditional journalism can undermine good collective responses by decision makers and societies.

For instance, Siberia and the Arctic more generally are burning right now, due to unprecedented warming and dryness; one estimate suggests that the scale of warming in northern summer in 2020 is 600 times more likely because of climate change. These are events that have not been seen for many millennia, and perhaps even for tens or hundreds of thousands of years on this scale. Siberia is experiencing the soil equivalent of the loss of Greenland’s ice sheets. Why aren’t these stories at the top of our newsfeeds?

As humans, we all have a tendency to renormalize, and to do so frequently. The coronavirus is a good example: many of us have renormalized to quite unusual conditions very rapidly, even if our current circumstances would have seemed unthinkable just a few months ago.

Climate change often occurs on a pace that can be easily renormalized — it’s not hard to adjust to gradual change, even if what is gradual to us is remarkably fast by paleo timescales. We can expect Arctic fires to become regular events rather than exceptional or unusual within a few years, even if the current events are striking, even horrifying. The journalist on the podcast suggested we may need moments of perspective — of awareness of change over time — to help register the level of shock to act in response. I strongly sense that long-term governance, planning, and technical assessment programs can help us make use of perspective and mobilize insight. We promote these approaches here. Indeed, we held a webinar last week on these approaches with UNESCO, The World Bank, ICIWaRM, and other partners.

But I sense that there is another level with climate change that makes journalism and reflection difficult: delivering bad news without potential solutions. I am sure that physicians hate giving diagnoses to difficult health problems without a range of options for a patient, and no doubt journalists feel something similar. 

If we feel like policy processes and decision makers more generally are adrift and unresponsive, I suspect the challenge is less one of denial and more of what can we do? As members of AGWA, we all know we can do a lot. However, the transition for most journalists, the public, and for decision makers is away from “how do we get back to normal” — a pre-disease state — and to “how do we live with shifting conditions, more akin to addressing a chronic and evolving health problem. 

We’re not fighting climate change. We are living with it. And we need to show how, together.

John Matthews, Corvallis, Oregon, USA