Would abandoning false hope help us to tackle the climate crisis?
Jonathan Watts
Leaders are eager to fill us with positivity, but research shows people in distress are more likely to take collective action

Thu 24 Oct 2024 11.35 EDT

If despair is the most unforgivable sin, then hope is surely the most abused virtue. That observation feels particularly apposite as we enter the Cop season, that time of United Nations megaconferences at the end of every year, when national leaders feel obliged to convince us the future will be better, despite growing evidence to the contrary.

Climate instability and nature extinction are making the Earth an uglier, riskier and more uncertain place, desiccating water supplies, driving up the price of food, displacing humans and non-humans, battering cities and ecosystems with ever fiercer storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts and forest fires. Still worse could be in store as we approach or pass a series of dangerous tipping points for Amazon rainforest dieback, ocean circulation breakdown, ice-cap collapse and other unimaginably horrible, but ever more possible, catastrophes.

Yet, apparently we must still have hope. It is mandatory. Change is impossible, we are told, without positive thinking and a belief in a better future. That is the message of just about every politician and business leader I have interviewed in close to two decades on the environment beat.

And we will hear it again, at the UN biodiversity Cop16 in Cali, Colombia, which kicked off this week, then at the climate Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, in a few weeks’ time. If past international confabs are any guide, there is little prospect of concrete action in the here and now, but there will be ever-more ambitious plans for the distant future: roadmaps, commitments, targets, reasons to hope. And, of course, we will hear it most loudly in the US presidential election, which is always about which candidate is most faithful to the American dream of endless expansion.

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