What We Think about When We Think about Climate Action

Cross-cultural research published in the American Anthropological Journal (2000) suggests that the way we speak depends on how much time we spend outside. The difference of speaking time outside and language are related to climate. 

For example, speaking is not an outdoor activity in Viking weather, whereas in Africa it is in a bench under a bower in the sun. So, we see in southern language more consonant-vowel syllable, because they are more powerful and travel further and hence this is needed when someone works outside. But in northern language we see more consonant-vowel-consonant syllables, which require less power to pronounce. Climate affects language in other ways too. Places with higher level of humidity tend to have languages with a higher proportion of vowels, for the same reason that tonal languages like Chinese emerges in humid climate. It is also observed that where there are areas of dense plant cover, you will see more sonorous vowels, which means high acoustic energy and volume, because they have to fight their way through all the foliage.

A research paper published in the Evolutionary Human Sciences (2024) suggests that climate drives language evolution, but it does more than that. Climate also drives the evolution of human beliefs, known as ‘whorfianism’, which is based on the principle that the structure of a language dictate or influence how its speakers perceive and think about the world. This means that language influences world view.In the context of the climate change, linguists and cognitive scientists argue that shifting the terminology from passive or abstract concepts to active, human-centric language can significantly boost public engagement and climate action.

Other climate related behaviour is that the hotter and more humid a country, the more pathogens they have to contend with and the more likely they are to subscribe to what look like socially conservative values. Research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2017) suggests that environment with higher level of pathogen favour strict norms and rules to ensure nobody does anything unexpected. They tend to be collectivist-prefer community over individual, because in a world of high contagion, an individual’s choice can have a devastating impact on the group. For similar reasons, such environment predicts greater prejudice towards people who look different and become neophobic.

Besides pathogen and extreme weather, the variability of climate itself is a key influence on our beliefs. Extreme climate may produce inflexible belief systems, but highly variable one tends to produce the opposite. Research carried out at Harvard by Nunn and Giuliano (2009) suggests that places with lots of weather variations tend to produce people more open to change and less attached to tradition. This means variable climate tend to produce flexibility in our attitude but extreme hot and humid climate tend to make us more introvert and closed to new experiences and people.

While we consider various psychological, linguistic and socio-economic factors for implementing climate action, there are limits and hard choices we need to bear in mind. There will be some hard and soft limit. For example, one of the hard physical limits is where land is lost to the sea. Soft limits are what people or government can afford to pay or what inconvenience people are willing to live with. Peoples can stay living in many coastal locations if low lying land can be raised. People can stay living in areas of extreme heat if they have access to indoor air-conditioned 
spaces. 

Even if there are enough money available for adaptation tomorrow, there remain huge challenges in how adaptation is implemented. Sometimes adaptation makes people more vulnerable to climate impacts. This might happen straight away or over the long term and is called ‘maladaptation’. Schipper (2020) in his research on ‘maladaptation’ published in One Earthjournal shows that sometime individuals or household making the best choice they can with the information they have or planned adaptation supported by the government of international donors that has not been well designed which leads to maladaptation. Sometimes adaptation can also increase risks from climate change, if the action in one place intended to reduce risks for some people in fact increases them for others. One example is that an adaptation programme supporting people living along the river diverts water for irrigation, then people living downstream would have less water for irrigation. 

Another research published in the Environmental Hazards journal (2011) suggests that efforts to control floods in Bangladesh led to people without land not being able to find food and resources to sell, meaning they were more vulnerable to climate change. It is also to be noted that if the adaptation strategy encourages continued development along the low-lying coastline but the cost of raising up houses and managing the water coming up becomes too high or even unmanageable, it will not be economically viable to live with sea level rise at the coastal area.

In short, there are various ways one can take climate action such as by cutting greenhouse gas emission, adaptation to unavoidable climate impacts and promoting circular economy. However, in addition to mitigation and adaptation, there are various socio-economic, psychological, behavioural and linguistic factors need to be considered in order to implement the various climate action.