Environmental scholars are worried about the lack of public recognition and behaviour change around how serious climate change is for the future of our planet. Why are we not changing our behaviour and how can we encourage change?
Even the catastrophic forest fires in California or the Arctic, glacier melt, the most recent shocking IPCC report or the UN Biodiversity statement are not sufficient, apparently, to bring about a political transformation or a tipping point for radical change. While we now have an encouraging growth of mass movements with climate strikes, one wonders will this be sustainable into the long-term future, with no quick fixes in prospect. According to scholars like the Norwegian psychologist Per Espen Stoknes (2015), what is needed is the ‘work of a cultural movement similar to the ones that dismantled apartheid, abolished slavery, or took on nuclear arms’.