I spend a lot of time building resources and learning experiences to help people learn for climate action. One part of this work is ensuring that we have the knowledge we need to take meaningful and effective climate actions. However, an equally important aspect of this work is helping people figure out how to trust the information they have available and identify which knowledge is most useful for the local challenges we face in our own communities, work lives, and home decision making spaces. Sorting out the abundance of information to get down to truth and knowledge useful for decision-making around climate issues is grounded in our beliefs and values. Later episodes will help us dive into what values are at the root of the future we want to build for our families and communities but let’s first explore the connections between these ideas and how they impact climate action.

Climate Knowledge Systems: Beliefs, Values, Information, Knowledge, and Truth

We are in a bit of a paradox when it comes to learning about climate change because how we understand the world around us influences what we care about and how we act; while at the same time what we care about influences how we understand the world around us. 

This is one of the reasons that it can be challenging to learn about climate change, as we often only seek to learn the things we care about or value and even reject information that we feel contradicts our beliefs or values. Yet if we broaden our scope of learning more, the new information we gain might shift our beliefs and values too – the things that influence how we make sense of information itself, providing new ways of understanding the world that were previously closed to us.

But this is challenging too. Why would most folks want to open their beliefs and values to potential changes? Our beliefs are the convictions we have about how the world is, what we believe to be true. Our values are those principles and standards shaped by our cultural, social, and moral grounding that guide our behavior and decision-making; they help us decide what is important and how to live. Our beliefs and values interact with each other to help us process information, build knowledge, and decide on what we see as truth. 

Oddly enough, the idea of truth itself is often seen as something that just is in the world, not debatable, absolute, independent of beliefs or opinion. Nonetheless, when we think about truth in our own minds, it is always filtered through our beliefs and values. For example, the idea that the Earth is roughly spherical is a commonly held truth in our current day, supported by all sorts of different shared experiences, pieces of evidence eg. ships disappearing over the horizon, shadows of the sun, sunrise and sunsets at different locations, eclipses, Apollo 8 earthrise photo, etc. Yet some people, because of their beliefs and values, continue to think that the Earth is flat. The way we move between beliefs, values, and truth is related to evidence. We use a variety of different forms of evidence in our decision-making at all points in our lives to figure out what is true. 

Evidence is a form of information. We constantly mix information we receive about the world around us with our beliefs and values to develop more complex ideas – the knowledge that guides us in our everyday actions and that is accumulated across our lives through our experiences. We also accumulate knowledge, as a human society, through our oral and written traditions of sharing information, values, beliefs, and knowledge eg. stories, books, art, etc. These ways of sharing and the understandings they communicate can be thought of as knowledge systems. While our knowledge is constantly shifting and growing as we also expand or refine our values and beliefs. 

Our knowledge of climate change, of human caused climate change, is where we often differ in society about what is happening, how humans are contributing, and what can be done. Not all evidence of climate change, or most things, has the same quality, social acceptance, or power to influence climate action. Climate evidence sources that produce knowledge that is considered by the majority of policy makers as high quality, broadly accepted, and globally influential include:

• International Panel on Climate Change
• The Royal Society
• American Geosciences Institute
• World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal
• Office of Climate Education

A primary characteristic of these sources is that they involve more than one individual or organization in the creation and synthesis of knowledge, they constantly expand and revise their understandings as new information becomes available, and they provide transparency in how the information is collected and synthesized. These practices help to minimize bias in information provided that is part of all human activity.

Climate Change in the Information Era: Discerning Truth from Noise

While all of knowledge reflects human experiences with the world, not all of it is reflective of larger collective understandings of truth or helpful in dealing with the lived realities of climate change regardless of what you understand to be true. Climate change knowledge is complex, doesn’t fit well into binaries, and is constantly emergent…in other words it’s messy. 

Adding to confusion about climate change are different forms of problematic information practices. You can look up the definitions of practices as misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, rumors, fake news, conspiracy theories, exaggeration, clickbait, echo chambers, and social media amplification and start to explore when these information sharing activities are beneficial, annoying, or outright harmful at scales from local community climate action to larger global efforts. In considering sources of information, I really appreciate this framework from the Canadian Center for Cyber Security which defines four categorizes of information quality:

• Valid information means that it is factually correct, is based on data that can be confirmed and isn’t misleading in any way
• Inaccurate information is either incomplete or manipulated in a way that portrays a false narrative
• False information is incorrect and there is data that disproves it
• Unsustainable information can neither be confirmed nor disproved based on the available data

This might be a helpful way to consider how to define truth for yourself as you sift through information on climate change considering the sources and issues of bias. Sometimes though, information doesn’t fit cleanly into these four categories because of the way it is being communicated. For example, there may be valid information, but it is shared with explicit belief or value statements that conflict with your own. In such situations, you may perceive that information to be inaccurate. 

The great thing about information in a democratic society is we should be free to share it, to learn from each other, and where we are trying to seek truth not just reaffirm our own beliefs, values, and knowledge, then we might grow and shift from such learning. The value we place on the sharing of information, in any given society, is often encoded in our laws or social norms. Internationally, the Declaration of Human Rights states that:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. (Article 19)

Nations across the world have versions of this right in their own laws. For example, in the European Convention on Human Rights provides a value of knowledge sharing called Freedom of Expression takes its initial language directly from the UN Declaration on Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. (Article 10, Part 1)

However, this initial right is then expressly limited by other rights also carrying shared societal value:

The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary. (Article 10, Part 2).

In the U.S. the First Amendment of the Constitution allows us to have a diversity of beliefs and ways of sharing our thinking by stating that:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This enshrined right in the U.S. around how people share thinking, often talked about as Freedom of Speech, is a highly valued right. While there is much discussion around the boundaries of this right, it is a shared value among American society. 

While democracies across the world value the sharing of knowledge, this is not universal among all human societies. For example, China limits the sharing of knowledge in a variety of ways. We have to be ever vigilant to understand that information and knowledge sharing is critical to democratic systems. Constraint or erasure of information and knowledge is a slippery slope away from democracy and a restriction of our human rights. 

From Overload to Clarity: Centering Catalytic Cooperation

In decisions related to climate action, we sometimes have conflicting beliefs and values. For example, many people believe that climate action is needed but they also believe that other people around them are not willing to take climate action, reducing their own willingness to take climate action. There are several ways around this dilemma:

• We can think about raising awareness about the broad global support for climate action, for our collective impact, reducing concerns around the free rider problem, and/or
• We can change incentives for acting to foster catalytic cooperation.

I am going to focus here on the idea of catalytic cooperation as I would argue that most of our challenges around the free rider problem are because we don’t trust others, we aren’t in close relationship with each other, we don’t care about each other, and we have differential impacts of climate change and possible climate actions. 

Now this gets a bit technical but stay with me. In his review of climate mitigation politics, Hale identified several features in global climate action that differed from the tragedy of the commons argument underlying collective impact approaches to the issue:

1. Joint goods: Contributions to collective action can yield private benefits for those that act in addition to public benefits for all. 
2. Preference heterogeneity: Some actors value collective action highly, others little. Similarly, the costs and benefits of a given contribution to collective action vary across actors. 
3. Increasing returns: Action in the past can reduce the cost and increase the benefit of action in the future, while also changing how actors value collective action.

Because of these issues, multi-national collective action has some limits – though is still important for many reasons. One way around the dilemmas associated with global collective action is to accelerate climate action using catalytic cooperation, unilateral cooperation which can lead to increasing returns and tipping points for climate action. This type of cooperation can be done with fewer actors at a multitude of scales and is grounded on those who already have climate action values that can then help to foster incentives for others to engage in new ways of being and doing in any given area of human activity. Additionally, those working in this space can form catalytic institutions to share ideas and practices, provide resources and support, and advance new climate action efforts. 

Many examples of catalytic cooperation around climate change are already happening: Bloomberg Climate; C40 Cities; Building Green; Local Governments for Sustainability; Green Sports Alliance; and many others. To foster catalytic cooperation, we need to work in relational networks in community grounded activities, across job-alike associations, bioregional collaborations, or sector nexus endeavors. Additionally, we need to also improve humanity’s connection to and relationship with nature. 

As we move forward with both collective impact efforts and catalytic cooperation, we need to be aware that public support for such efforts is often grounded in perceptions of fairness. As such any approach we take needs to reduce psychological distance to climate action, improve personal norms and community involvement, and foster a more grassroots social movement for climate action. This applies equally to how we share information, build knowledge, and reassess our own and our communities’ beliefs and values with respect to our climate future.

Resources

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