Humanity has throughout its history adapted guardrails to protect against threats, like disease, war and economic collapse. Crucially, it has also developed social understanding and acceptance of these safeguards, which can be costly and disruptive.
Today, the greatest catastrophic threat we face is climate change, but a wide-scale understanding of the problem has not translated into an acceptance of the urgency of protective mechanisms. The novelty of climate change could be one reason: humanity has never faced such a threat, so safety feedback loops within society have not evolved as they have for other threats.
Could this be overcome by drawing analogies between the climate crisis and other challenges with which we are more familiar? This kind of framing is an important strategy for shaping how an issue is communicated and understood, and to influence decision-making.
Climate change is commonly framed as an environmental issue. See, for example, which government departments are typically responsible for climate legislation, or the section of the media under which it is reported. While climate change is undoubtedly a grave threat to the natural environment, and we are intrinsically dependent on the natural world, emphasising the environmental damage caused by climate change may lead to an underestimation of the urgency and existential nature of risks that it poses to humans.
Climate action is fundamentally not about “saving the planet”, after all, but saving ourselves.
Shifting the framing of climate change from the environment to public health is gaining support. The human costs of climate change, fossil fuel dependency and environmental destruction are enormous. A health framing could garner greater support for faster, deeper and more transformative action, by bringing the problem close to home, making it personal, and evoking attitudes of care, which could help overcome the rhetoric of delay, which emphasises the cost and disruption of climate action.
The climate movement can also draw lessons from the deep shifts that have taken place across society in the name of protecting public health, many of which relate to individual behaviour change: wearing seat belts, brushing our teeth and washing hands, exercising and eating healthily, safe sex practices.
These changes in cultural norms and practices did not occur spontaneously or without a struggle. The State, supported by advocacy groups and a weight of scientific evidence, plays a hugely interventionist role in protecting public health, and not just through expenditure. Large ongoing public education campaigns and strict regulation of private industries, including advertising, have created cultural expectations and often legal obligations to take individual and collective responsibility for preventing harm to ourselves and others. This is the model we need to follow to ensure the health and stability of our planetary systems.
Societies have shown a huge capacity for urgent responses to public health threats, like disease. Take, for example, the Covid-19 pandemic, where whole industries and behaviours were temporarily forbidden, working remotely became the norm in many sectors, and the scientific community worked together with pharmaceutical industries to develop novel vaccines with astonishing speed. Meanwhile, scientific experts and public health professionals were fixtures of the media, explaining the causes of the disease and preventive measures.
The pandemic is by no means a perfect analogy for climate action. A successful response to the climate crisis does not need be anywhere nearly as disruptive, but does need to be permanent: we only tolerated the dramatic response to Covid-19 on the condition that it would allow us to go back to normal.
The public health response to smoking is another interesting case. Ireland’s introduction of a workplace smoking ban 20 years ago, has since been replicated across the world and was a milestone in society’s changing relationship with smoking. Then minister for health Micheál Martin showed political bravery and leadership in introducing the ban, in the face of lobbying and pressure from the tobacco industry and others, and a widespread view that the ban would be unpopular and fail. The move is now regarded as a big medical and social advance.
The main justification for this ban was not necessarily to improve the health of smokers, but to ensure the right of workers to have a healthy workplace, free of passive smoking. Protecting vulnerable people was also core to our response to the pandemic, and should also underpin our response to the climate crisis: A recent global survey showed that framing climate change around protecting the planet for future generations increases support for government action far more than messaging around opportunities for job creation or economic growth.
Lessons from decades of public health research can also help guide climate policy. For example, awareness of the benefits of an intervention to improve health, like quitting smoking or exercising, is not necessarily effective on its own at changing behaviour: systemic forces, like advertising and culture, must also be addressed. Actors are no longer paid to smoke in films, and the marketing of cigarettes has been severely restricted. Should we take the same approach to climate-damaging products like fossil-fuelled cars, flights, and beef?
Perhaps the ultimate lesson from public health is that prevention is better than cure: Coping with the effects of climate change will be enormously costly, just like the effects of smoking, and will get even worse the longer we delay taking preventive action. Hopefully, we will act in time before a terminal diagnosis becomes inevitable.
Hannah Daly is professor of sustainable energy at University College Cork