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Human ‘behavioural crisis’ at root of climate breakdown, say scientists

New paper claims unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster

 Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month
out from Cop28, the world is further than ever from reaching its collective
climate goals.

At the root of all these problems, according to recent
research, is the human “behavioural crisis”, a term coined by an
interdisciplinary team of scientists. “We’ve socially engineered
ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet,” says Joseph Merz, lead
author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of
ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate
exploitation of human behaviour.

“We need to become mindful of the way
we’re being manipulated,” says Merz, who is co-founder of the Merz
Institute, an organisation that researches the systemic causes of the
climate crisis and how to tackle them. Merz and colleagues believe that
most climate “solutions” proposed so far only tackle symptoms rather
than the root cause of the crisis. This, they say, leads to increasing
levels of the three “levers” of overshoot: consumption, waste and
population.

 Guardian 13th Jan 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/13/human-behavioural-crisis-at-root-of-climate-breakdown-say-scientists

January 16, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change