Climate Protest Movement - An Accelerator of Societal Transformation?
Authors: Schlosser, Peter; 1 Rockström, Johan; 2 van der Leeuw, Sander; 3 Edwards, Clea; 4* Gaffney, Owen; 5 Hoskins, Brian; 6 Jacob, Daniela; 7 Klingenfeld, Daniel; 8 Lenton, Timothy M.; 9 Máñez Costa, María; 10 Sonntag, Sebastian; 11 Srivastava, Leena 12
1 Global Futures Laboratory, Arizona State University, 300 E University Dr. Tempe, AZ 85281, USA 2 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, 14412 Potsdam, Germany 3 Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, Arizona State University, PO Box 875502 Tempe, AZ 85287-5502 4 Global Futures Laboratory, Arizona State University, 300 E University Dr. Tempe, AZ 85281, USA 5 Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Kräftriket 2B, SE-10691 6 The Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ, tel: +44 (0)20 7589 5111 7 Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Fischertwiete 1, 20095 Hamburg, Germany 8 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, 14412 Potsdam, Germany 9 Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, North Park Road, Exeter, EX4 4QE, UK 10 Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Fischertwiete 1, 20095 Hamburg, Germany 11 Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Fischertwiete 1, 20095 Hamburg, GermanyNOT 12 International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Schlossplatz 1 - A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Author for correspondence: Clea Edwards, email: [email protected]
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ORCIDs:
Name ORCID Email Peter Schlosser https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6514-4203
Word Count: 3070
Social Media summary Can protests accelerate societal transformation?
Abstract
Transforming the discourse between the scientific community and society at large for improved decision-making is a vital component of the societal change required to address the climate crisis. In this commentary, we present observations around the heightened awareness among the public concerning issues related to climate change. The article explores the potential for the global climate movement to trigger meaningful societal change on a global scale in response to the current climate crisis and other related pressures on the Earth system.
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Summary
Recent civic action may indicate that we are approaching a tipping point in which a substantive proportion of the population is no longer willing to tolerate global warming, recognizes that it is a crucial determinant of future life conditions, and is motivated to address the personal implications and consequences facing future generations. Globally, citizens engaged in protest articulate their comprehension that we are changing the climate of our planet in an increasingly dangerous way, the consequences of which are becoming more and more apparent. There is both rhetorical and political power in these movements – and scientists must engage to further the understanding of the issues involved, as many have. In September 2019, The Earth League, a network of leading scientists and institutions, declared support for this substantial wave of climate activism across the globe, ignited by young people. We suggest that now is a particularly important time for scientists to rethink their communication channels and contribute responsibly – especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic – to efforts that stimulate climate action and to enable our scientific contributions to be more nimble, accessible, and connected to society.
Planetary Emergency
Overwhelming scientific evidence supports the characterization of the movement’s concerns about climate change and future living conditions on the planet, as nothing less than a Planetary Emergency (Steffen et al., 2015). The 2018 IPCC 1.5℃ report shows that warming the globe by more than 1.5℃ will have major societal implications, potentially triggering irreversible changes to life-supporting systems on Earth. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019 makes clear that the sixth mass extinction of species on Earth is underway, seriously threatening the resilience of biomes and the ability of ecosystems to provide the services that guarantee human wellbeing. Societal transformation in a rapid timeframe at all scales across the entire world is needed imminently to limit warming to 1.5℃ and limit the risk of an irreversible “Hothouse Earth” trajectory, among other negative impacts (Steffen et al., 2018). For example, global emissions of CO2 from fossil-fuel burning must be cut by half between 2020 and 2030, a carbon net zero world is needed by mid century and biodiversity loss must be halted. The relative inaction by the governments of the greatest polluting countries, further confirmed by limited commitments at the COP25 in Madrid, puts a fine point on the complexity of the global challenges.
New Movements as Societal Response
The Climate Movement has become global in scale. On September 20, 2019, following #FridaysForFuture (FFF), a school strike and protest platform, an estimated four million people or more, mainly high school students, participated in over 2,500 events scheduled in more than 163 countries on all seven continents (Barclay & Resnick, 2019). This movement was started by now 17 year-old Greta Thunberg, a Swedish high school student, through a solo protest more than one year prior (August 2018) against the lack of action on the climate crisis, specifically Swedish policies that she concluded not to be aligned with the Paris Agreement. As FFF developed from a single person protest to an organized movement across the world, another group, Extinction Rebellion (XR), organized around concerns about the future of our planet and its inhabitants. October 7, 2019 marked the start of two weeks of Extinction Rebellion’s coordinated international array of protests in major cities, to “continue to rebel against the 3 world’s governments for their criminal inaction on the Climate and Ecological Crisis.”i On December 1, XR initiated another two week protest. Since the inception of FFF, groups similarly aligned have emerged or gained momentum including the Youth Climate Strike, School Strike for Climate, Sunrise Movement, and Zero Hour.
Their goals are similar, committed to awareness raising and declaring a relentless commitment to the cause until meaningful action occurs, but their approaches differ. Through peaceful demonstrations, FFF calls upon global society to (a) recognize that the planet has natural boundaries and (b) challenges decision makers to operate within a long-term framework, prioritizing human well-being and environmental health, preserving options for current and future generations. Through non-violent civil disobedience, disrupting urban sites of cultural significance and thoroughfares, XR demands (a) truth-telling by governments about the current planetary emergency, (b) action “to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025” and (c) development of pathways for citizens’ direct participation in decision- making on all areas relevant to climate and ecological issues. While the target date is questionable, the commitment is certainly not. The climate movement has been relatively inclusive of participants of all ages, backgrounds, race, beliefs and other characteristics of difference.
The active engagement among youth has been enormous, representing a protest against inter- generational inequity – something which is taken as a given in mainstream ‘cost-benefit analysis’ of climate change, which discounts future damages as well as the cost of future action (e.g. carbon dioxide removal). Choices that have been made since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution have placed pressure on virtually all domains of the Earth system and are projected to result in increasingly negative outcomes. While we do not consider “the youth” to be conceived of as a monolith, there has been a substantial number of young people across the globe expressing their growing concerns. These include the shrinking option space for themselves and future generations to shape the environment in which they will live, and the growing burden of damages caused by people of current and past generations, some of whom persist in making deleterious decisions about the future of the planet. This, of course, is all the more relevant for the underprivileged. In other words, perceived present needs, ahead of the ability of future generations to meet their needs and thrive, have guided decision-making in significant ways.
This is not the first rebellion of those among younger generations against specific causes or more broadly-based societal conditions. Although the uprisings mainly originated on university or college campuses (Astor, 2018), there are also significant movements by high school students such as the recent protest wave against gun violence in the US (Novitch, 2018). The rise of hippie counterculture in the 1960s offers an interesting example of youth achieving persistent societal change through a particular form of civic engagement. The cultural legacy is apparent in music, discourse around health and vegetarian foods, communalism with nature, and pacifism. The youth climate movement is consistent with existing ‘tipping point’ models of political change/revolution/protest, where what was a silent majority becomes a public rebellion (Otto et al., 2020). As with all tipping points there needs to be a self-amplifying feedback. In this case, it hinges on there being a difference between privately held beliefs and publicly held positions, and triggered when some actor(s) (such as Greta Thunberg) change their public position [by visibly protesting/rebelling against the status quo rather than remaining passive], which reduces the
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‘opportunity cost’ for others to join the protest. The more young people who protest, the easier it becomes for others to join them.
While this is not the first time that science has inspired action – take, for example, the environmental activism initiated by organizations like Greenpeace in the 1970s which raised significant international attention on issues like biodiversity loss and global warming – the scale of the current movement is unlike any the world has experienced. Among the motivating factors, beyond the warnings and calls for action by science over at least two decades, are the increased visibility of climate change in the form of more frequent extreme weather events, glaring evidence of inadequate political and economic activity to mitigate, adapt and respond to it, and the serious repercussions thereof as well as the inequitable distribution of impacts. Topics like sea level rise, fires in Alaska and Alberta, Canada, California, Brazil, and Australia, stalling hurricanes literally drowning affected regions such as Texas or the Bahamas, and targeted power shutoffs in Southern California have become household conversation subjects.
Perhaps, we are nearing a meaningful point of origin of a socio-economic transformation process that is now gaining speed, but which in many cases has been in the making for several years, across nations, economic sectors, and stakeholders. Political steps in the right direction, although without the urgency or seriousness required, include the adoption of the Paris agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2015; rising engagement in business through, e.g., “We Mean Business” and the World Business Council For Sustainable Development; and, the fact that approximately 50 nations have adopted a price on carbon and partially decoupled economic growth from emissions of greenhouse gases (Falk et al., 2019). Perhaps, it is this lack of urgency and seriousness of such decision-making progress that has laid the groundwork for the Youth Movement and other climate activism, in conjunction with the increasing frequency and visibility of the impacts of climate change.
The strong participation in these movements is attributable to a latent frustration among a segment of the youth at the perceived inaction which, at least in large part, was fueled by both the existence and smart leveraging of social and new media, and nimble and distributed organizational structures. Broader access to information and communication technologies across generations, regions, and socio-economic status is relevant to the speed with which societal dynamics evolve, including the composition of the current climate movement. The cooperative relationship (for example, see https://globalclimatestrike.net/partners/) that the youth movement and non-governmental organizations nurtured with one another, such as Friends of the Earth International and 350.org, has enhanced the reach.
Notably, particularly during the past decade, the world has witnessed quite significant collective action with far-reaching consequences which, arguably, preconditioned society for the climate movement. Examples include the Arab Spring, the Yellow Vests Movement in France that began in October 2018, the Hong Kong protests of 2019 and similar protest movements in 2019 in Venezuela, Lebanon, India and other countries. Although their precise origins and goals were different, it seems that they are part of a longer-term trend of alienation of large parts of our societies from the powers and institutions that have driven globalization, causing corporatization, wealth discrepancy and other forms of injustice, and the associated deleterious use of resources. Viewed in combination, we may infer that there is a heightened degree of discontentment in
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The uneven uptake of scientific ideas across the global policy landscape is a challenging, yet comprehensible, reality: for example, while discursive energy is diverted and time is squandered in the U.S. to debating the existence of climate change, populations and leaders in poorer countries are grappling with the realities of climate change in emergency response, adaptive infrastructural plans, and shrinking GDP, as key industries are impacted such as fishing by ocean acidification (Ekstrom, 2015) or agriculture by drought or extreme rains. As climate change is an intersectional issue, with its impacts affecting particularly the most vulnerable communities, but ultimately the entire global society, the distributed active engagement of global society may indicate it’s increasing reflection on the existential questions humankind is facing. This is not to ignore that the majority of the global population remains more entrenched in managing daily responsibilities and coping with environmental or circumstantial challenges than commenting on the climate crisis. Although it attracted participation from countries around the world, the Extinction Rebellion faces criticism about the predominately white and middle-class composition of participants (Mother Jones Podcast, 2019). Among the criticisms of XR’s emphasis on arrest appears to be a degree of ignorance of the long history of often irreconcilable relations between law enforcement and nonwhites, immigrants, and those from lower income communities, at least in some countries. Movement leaders point to their duty to act on account of their privilege (Gayle, 2019; Brown, 2019), and that it is important to balance this with building relationships and capacity across all communities.
Changing Mindsets and Changing Action
Over the past decade, leading nonpartisan research institutions have released annual opinion polls on citizens’ views of climate risks and the need for climate action. Persistently, these polls show that in countries across the world, including the US, citizens are increasingly worried about climate change and want climate action (Marlon, et al., 2019; Pew Research Center, 2019). The Spring 2018 “Global Attitudes Survey” from the Pew Research Center revealed climate as the top perceived threat for all of Europe. Those among the so-called millennial generation in the US largely (nearly 70%) report an expectation that climate change will affect them in their lifetimes, according to a poll produced by the Alliance for Market Solutions (German, 2018). Millennials are more worried than older generations, and, among millennials, females are the most worried and those with highest percentage calling for action (Fagan & Huang, 2019). Global experts and decision-makers rank climate and environmental issues among their top concerns for the next decade, as represented in the latest World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report. This reveals something critical. The shift among public mindsets in developed countries, comprising some of the greatest polluters, has been well underway. Greta Thunberg has been an important agent channeling a rapidly growing revolution of awareness and rising expectations into concerted action. Her solo protest may have been the catalyst for the wider will to engage in activities that will avert catastrophic consequences resulting from overexploiting Earth’s resources, bringing the planet back onto a safe trajectory, and with a healthy set of options for the younger generations to shape their future.
This is further reinforced by the spill-over effects being experienced in Europe. The latest European elections were clearly affected by the Movement, with climate change running among 6 the top three political agenda priorities (together with immigration and welfare). In Germany, the Green Party got over 20% of the votes and became the strongest political party of all voters under the age of 60 (25% nationally, relative to 22% for the Christian Democrats in this age group), and 34% voted Green, among those aged 18-24 (von Salzen, 2019; Bettendorf, 2019). In Switzerland, green parties obtained nearly 21% of the votes in the recent national election. Climate change was at the top of the political agenda in the Nordic countries as well, as is partly confirmed by the Danish parliamentary elections (Farand, 2019). In the UK elections, climate change was high up the agenda for the first time. The European Commission presented the European Green Deal in December 2019, a cross-industry plan for the continent to make a just transition to climate neutrality by 2050. Traction for the Green New Deal in the US has been immense, with more than 80% bipartisan support, according to a Yale University survey last December (Gustafson et al., 2018), and CNN hosted an unprecedented 7-hour “Climate Crisis Town Hall” in September with democratic presidential hopefuls in apparent response to public demand. Following the UN Climate Action Summit in September 2019, mayors of 90 major cities met on October 11, to demonstrate alignment with the movement’s concerns and commitment to meet some of the demands.
Scientists as Civic Actors
The youth movement has positioned itself as a voice and agent of pressure for science. Scientists have typically avoided direct engagement with society and politics or have taken pains to present a neutral, balanced picture of a topic and not promote specific options for choices. This approach has been the norm out of an intention to protect science from suspicions of bias, and to attempt to maintain credibility and the value of unbiased information in society. However, scientists can and, in many cases already do, work to connect with society in their position as educated citizens. In such a role, they can provide perspectives on appropriate actions not taken by reluctant stakeholder groups including political decision makers. We must be prepared to listen and engage constructively with non-scientists in the collective dialogue about the best options for finding the trajectories towards a sustainable future for our planet. Scientifically educated citizens need not shy away from interacting with, helping, and encouraging the members of the climate (and, more broadly based, environmental) movements (including youth) to know that solutions are feasible, but that there is no silver bullet. Merging knowledge systems from diverse stakeholder communities will strengthen the impact of these movements and the resulting constructive action.
The scientific community, through open publications signed by over 6,300 academics across the world, announced their support for the youth movement. The "Scientists for the Future" initiative represents a unique support for the movement, in part because it recognizes the critical role of values in translating science into action. With this, scientists basically declared agreement with the FFF movement when it states that "we have done our homework now is the time for you [the adults in politics and business] to do your homework" (Hagedorn et al., 2019). Some scientists have chosen to show support to varying degrees on social media, or published perspective pieces in scientific outlets (Gardner & Wordley, n.d.). On the other side of the spectrum, we witness further entrenchment against the realities of climate change and disparagement of activism. For example, the Premier of Queensland, Australia, is attempting to push forward legislation to significantly increase consequences for civil disobedience. Similar legislation is being considered in the UK (Hymas et al., 2019).
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But such activities are just the beginning of meaningful engagement by the scientific community. It is time that the science community move from a largely reactive position to an active one that would accelerate societal transformation. Scientists need not become fully immersed in activism in order to pursue dialogue with those who shape and sustain the movements, or explore how to accelerate the transition of the movements to truly multigenerational issues of vital importance. The scientific community could recognize the climate movements as a call to action, place more effort into the understanding of societal tipping points, and how they can constructively be used for broadly based societal transformation (Otto et al., 2020). Without a substantial transformation of society and its decision making, we are destined to steer towards a state in which the planet responds to the disequilibrium humankind has created in the Earth system, with dire consequences for all life supporting systems.
Conclusions
The global climate movement has demonstrated its strength and great potential to persist in the numbers of attendees at protests, the social and news media attention, and the recognition some of the leaders have received (such as Thunberg’s platform at the UN Climate Summit). The intergenerational, multi-sectoral, and cross-scale qualities of the climate movement, in combination with the increasing occurrence and attention to climatic events and effective use of communication tactics, may well point to the emergence of a global societal tipping point.
The world has turned a corner, where "sustainability" has shifted from being the environmental problem associated with sacrifice and willingness to pay (to protect nature) to rapidly being positioned at the heart of future prosperity, innovation, growth, equity, security and stability. Taken together, there is clear indication that more people are reflecting about the future. This is an opportunity for science to focus on direct contributions to changing the current trajectory of our planet and humankind. Civic engagement is integral to democracy and is often self- perpetuating (Fisher, n.d.). By undergoing its own strategic transformation to an active, rather than reactive, or at times even passive, entity within society, the academy can better contribute focused language and energy to such civic action in the future and ultimately be more meaningful to broader audiences.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge The Earth League, for engaging in a rich discussion of role of scientists in societal transitions, and providing valuable feedback and critical perspectives for this piece.
Author Contributions
Schlosser and Rockström initiated and framed the concept. Schlosser, van der Leeuw, and Edwards wrote the final version of the article. Máñez Costa, Gaffney, Jacob, Klingenfeld, Lenton, Hoskins, Sonntag, and Srivastava contributed material to the article and provided critical input throughout the process of framing and writing the article.
Financial Support
"This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not- for-profit sectors."
Conflicts of Interest declarations in manuscripts
There are no known conflicts of interest to report, relevant to the production of this manuscript.
Research Transparency and Reproducibility
The authors will adhere to the Research Transparency and Reproducibility policies through whatever means appropriate.
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