Is the Climate a Crisis?
Written by Prof Ilan Kelman, Sorcha Ní Chobhthaigh, and Abi Deivanayagam
Today, everything seems to be a crisis. We have the economic crisis, the migration crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and many more, all of which are easy to challenge. From explaining how crisisifying can hurt migrants to analysing whether or not today’s species extinctions are worthy of the ‘crisis’ term, scientists offer poignant approaches to solve the problems, rather than just label them.
One clarion call is the “climate crisis”, with a long list of other monikers including “climate emergency”, “climate breakdown”, and “climate disruption”. Some are ridiculous such as “climate obstruction”. After all, how could we obstruct the climate? Some sound dramatic, but are the expected norm, such as “climate chaos”, because the climate always displays characteristics of mathematical chaos.
In fact, from the beginnings of human-caused climate change being popularly framed as an “emergency” or “crisis”, scientific concerns were raised about this approach. Now, evidence is emerging that these phrases can inhibit constructive action. Its potential is to evoke a fear response, producing hopelessness-fuelled apathy, disengagement, nihilism, or even hedonism since apparently nothing matters, so might as well just feel good.
This is all notwithstanding the need for scientific precision in vocabulary. The concern is actually not climate per se, but rather human-caused climate change. Climate, climate change, natural climate change, and human-caused climate change are frequently conflated, confusing what to do for policy and action.
Criticism is easy. Offering ways forward is harder. In this case, focusing on causes and fundamental reasons offers alternatives.
Human-caused climate change is fundamentally due to human values, that subsequently shape attitudes, behaviour, and actions. As emphasised by the Centric Lab, “planetary dysregulation” is a term that aims to specify that planetary systems are unable to self-regulate, “particularly due to unsustainable exploitation of ecosystems and chronic exposure to industrial contamination”. Specifics relate to extractivism, consumerism, growth-is-good paradigms, and presuming that more consumption and increased monetary wealth accumulation must be positive.
If we stopped human-caused climate change immediately, then these same values, attitudes, behaviour, and actions would continue to lead to and perpetuate numerous other societal harms, notably for health, from human trafficking and slavery to fisheries and forest destruction. Human-caused climate change is one symptom among many, not a specific cause, of the crisis (problem? concern?) of human values, attitudes, behaviour, and actions. Highlighting a “climate crisis” or “climate change crisis” distracts from the real crises and emergencies — and their causes.
The previous paragraph could easily have been written about the other “crises”! Forced migration, biodiversity/ecodiversity/geodiversity loss, and people not being able to afford the basics for daily life all stem from the same fundaments as human-caused climate change. None are passive “crises”. All are enacted harms.
And few people have options to avoid contributing to these harms. The majority are neither deliberately choosing poorly nor necessarily avoiding their own, preferred values. The majority are forced to operate within societal structures making certain pathways feel inevitable while being touted as markers of success — accumulation of financial wealth, objects, and power. Systems of power cultivate and reward particular human values, attitudes, behaviours, and actions embedding them as the default assumptions about what is most accessible, affordable, and socially expected.
This approach represents not conscious moral failing, but the unconscious inheritance of values that serve abstract systems rather than ourselves or our planet. Through generations of socialisation, these frameworks have taken deepest hold where they align with material advantage — where extraction does translate into perceptions of individual “success”, status, and security, obscuring broader costs. Emphasis on abstract metrics such as “gross domestic product”, “economic efficiency”, and “growth” further fuels this at national and international levels, even as it collectively grinds us down and creates the “crises”.
If encapsulating it all in a single phrase is sought, then even “a fossil fuel company crisis” does not do justice to the baseline. Perhaps, instead, an overconsumption crisis, a human values emergency, or a human behaviour problem.
More straightforward and pinpointing exactly the concern: a greed crisis. Especially with the tendency of greed by the few who are privileged. They then impose their greed values on the many who already suffer from extractivism, industrialisation, and colonialism — processes that were meant to help the most disadvantaged and, instead, typically perpetuate and engrain established positions.
The “greed crisis” framing does not seek to blame individuals caught by and in societal systems. It aims to evoke a collective awakening to the ways society has been moulded to serve systems which do not serve everyone or the planet on which we all rely. Highlighting “greed” is not meant to invoke shame, which only reinforces avoidance. It should encourage reflection on how thoroughly those positioned within these systems have been conditioned to mistake extraction and consumption for success.
The crisis lies in how these internalised values work against collective flourishing, intertwined with the Earth’s. And so many alternatives exist, from buen vivir to the Essential Exponential, and from Falepili to well-being economies.
Would proposals such as “the greed crisis” make a positive difference, galvanising needed action without generating despair? We do not know, because they have not been tested. Instead, we continue to focus on and so be deflected by climate.
