Individual action is not enough to stop the escalation of global warming

In an article on The Conversation, Matthew Adams, Principal Lecturer in Psychology, instead argues that “collective action” is the most effective way of avoiding warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This was the figure that a recent report by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) urged the world needs to stay on or below in order to avoid environmental catastrophe.

The IPCC suggested that the impacts of 1.5 degrees Celsius warming are significantly more manageable than 2 degrees – but that in 12 years’ time a 1.5 degree target may be unattainable unless an “unprecedented” conservation effort is instigated.

Adams urges us to take influence from the spirit of communal resistance displayed in the suffragette and abolitionist to affect the decisions of policy-makers around climate change.

Reacting to the report, Adams writes: “What tends to happen with this kind of information is that it gets translated into a checklist of things we can do to make a difference – as individuals.

“Those of us in affluent, ‘developed’ societies – because those are the people to whom such lists are exclusively directed – can read the lists, think about what we can or already do individually, commit ourselves mentally to others, then park it and get on with our individual lives.

Matthew Adams

“Clearly, this is not enough. We need to shift the story away from the individual towards what we can achieve together.”

Instead of such “checklists”, Adams writes that starting conversations – first with friends and family and then on a larger public scale – is the best way to bring about a raised awareness of climate change.

He refers to women’s suffrage and abolitionism as movements that were built on “countless individual choices” but not “behaviour and lifestyles changes of the kind we associate with checklists”.

Adams writes: “These movements depended on people starting awkward conversations in everyday settings.

“Collective action is here interlinked with individual choice – choosing to talk, perhaps through awkwardness and embarrassment at first, learning, voting, writing, protesting, divesting and investing, taking a stand and seeking out others to do it with; coming together to demand societal and cultural change.”

By way of conclusion, Adams calls for an end to “how to make a difference” checklists: “Let’s live without them, and start talking.”