Crises in Crisis

By Tobias Leipprand

Some 5000 diplomats are currently meeting in Bonn, Germany, for the next round of UN climate talks. The global public couldn’t care less. Not because other events attract all the attention. Not because climate change doesn’t matter. It’s because the world got tired of crises with no prospect of being resolved. Those still advocating international action on climate change need to offer immediate solutions.

Climate change alone is already a difficult topic. In all likelihood you might feel like it hasn’t immediately affected your life at all. To care about it you need to understand complex causalities, have strong moral beliefs, and deeply care for the public good. You mustn’t be deterred by the history of slow and tedious climate negotiations, and the fact that some nations are free-riding – failing to contribute their share of emission reductions, while your government may be over-committing. If this doesn’t make you falter yet, listen to the growing number of climate skeptics. They are on the upside: Copenhagen was a failure, there are some miss-statements in the IPCC’s 2007 climate report, and last year, scientists at East Anglia University, UK, allegedly tampered with data to make climate change look worse than it is.

In light of all this, even the most adamant climate activists show signs of crisis fatigue, a widespread phenomenon among the public and politicians alike. Climate change is not the only crisis affected. The financial crisis in 2008/2009, the current Euro-crisis, or crises arising from ageing societies in many industrialized countries: they all received insufficient attention. Like climate change they involve highly complex issues and require difficult trade-offs between short-term and long-term objectives. Solutions require enormous change – a paralyzing thought.

It is interesting to see how the BP oil spill is an exception. News coverage is broad and so is public interest, even though this crisis has been dragging on for quite a while now. The reason is threefold. First, we have a culprit: BP. Second, the effects are immediate and visual with moving footage of dying sea life. And third, we can be live-witnesses of the enthralling odyssey of technicians and scientists attempting to close the leak with ever-new inventions.

Harvard’s Ronald Heifetz, professor for public leadership, distinguishes between two types of challenges. Technical challenges, like the BP oil spill, must be solved by an expert community. Adaptive challenges like climate change are much more difficult. Solving them requires a joint effort of many players. The solution is far from obvious and entails a fundamental change of how things are done – the diffused innovation that Scott Moore mentioned in the preceding blog post. According to Heifetz, societies tend to focus on technical challenges since they are easier and can be delegated. When forced to deal with adaptive challenges people try to avoid the necessary change: they blame others, question the leaders or deny the existence of the challenge. The climate change debate provides an abundance of textbook examples.

Fortunately, Heifetz also offers a solution: leadership. When societies fail to focus sufficiently on the task at hand it is the leaders' responsibility to turn the attention back to the problem. Our scientific leaders have failed to do so. With their doomsday scenarios they deter the public from the problem rather then engaging it.

It is therefore up to the political leaders to refocus the debate on solutions. Solutions based on political realities, based on what is possible in the current situation. Pointing fingers at the mighty two – the US and China – is again a mechanism of work avoidance.  A bad and a good example from Germany: Angela Merkel, once known as the 'climate chancellor', failed to leverage the EU's bargaining potential at last years Copenhagen climate conference. Afraid of the public opinion back home she hesitated too long and ended up sidelined. Her minister of the environment, Norbert Röttgen, makes smarter moves: his credo for the current climate talks in Bonn is 'action instead of negotiation' – 'handeln statt verhandeln'. He aims at creating piecemeal climate governance, starting with whatever is possible.

This also seems to be the most promising approach for the next major conference in Cancún, Mexico, coming December: a coalition of the ambitious setting their own voluntary yet binding emission targets and extending the European Emission Trading scheme (ETS). Instead of waiting for an agreement on a globally binding commitment that is unlikely to come anytime soon.

Tobias Leipprand is a fellow at the Berlin-based thinktank‚ stiftung neue verantwortung, where he also manages the leadership training programme.

Source: Global Policy Journal