Today’s worsening climate crisis needs the leaders of tomorrow

After 2023 broke the record for hottest year ever recorded, January and February broke global records again. 

This year’s climate-related disasters include sprawling wildfires in Texas cattle country and Mexico City’s unprecedented and intensifying water crisis. Meanwhile, continuing temperature increases will bring more air pollution, respiratory disease, pandemics, malnutrition, dehydration, malaria, strokes and other threats that will cause countless more deaths than extreme weather events.  

We know the science and have the technologies to tame climate change, but we’re not doing what needs to be done. It is urgent and essential that we make wiser choices and change our behavior.   

In the climate arena, a long-standing and legitimate grievance is that our highest leaders keep failing us — not all, of course, but overall. We need fewer top-down, autocratic decisions and more active outreach to knowledgeable stakeholders and those whose commitment to long-term action is essential to success. 

One or just a few leaders can only do some of what’s needed, particularly in complex, physics-driven, human-dominated ecosystems. We need more climate leaders. We can take a decisive step in the right direction by voting thoughtfully in fair November elections. Further, we can make dramatic progress by rethinking and reworking the meaning of leadership.  

We should think of leadership as a few top leaders plus a broader social attribute of a system — a widespread network of authorized and informal influencers and interconnected subsystems. We will strengthen our leadership when we elect more climate champions and enough potential climate leaders throughout society rise to the challenge. 

A key to outstanding leadership is a system of dispersed individuals and teams performing essential but underused leadership roles. Suitably coordinated leadership systems are complex, but the components begin one initiative at a time when someone has an idea and starts a conversation. These crucial leadership actions include:  

Building bridges by busting artificial silos and forging diverse, high-leverage coalitions. Examples include public-private-philanthropic partnerships, multi-state partnerships in New England, the Great Lakes region and western U.S. watersheds and a new series of Michigan bills that satisfy the governor and conflicting interests of environmentalists and labor unions.  

Engaging relevant voices outside of inner circles. Dysfunction Exhibit A is a legislative subgroup blocking progress by dictating agendas, commanding unanimous votes and shutting out others. Another is exceedingly powerful fossil fuel interests at COP-28 and other gatherings compared with the powerlessness of the Global South and other hard-hit populations. Potential benefits are high when collaborating with Indigenous communities to decide how best to harvest timber, restore rivers and manage wildlife. A further step toward restoring justice is returning land to Indigenous stewardship, as the Trust for Public Land is doing with the Penobscot Nation in Maine.    

Thinking and acting on behalf of the future. Climate change invites a pernicious decision bias: discounting the future, or inattention to likely and possible long-term consequences of our choices. Past experiences, habits and routines — including maintaining the status quo, current trajectories and circumstances and expected near-term consequences — guide our choices far more than longer-term consequences. Successful leadership, especially over time, does more than compel people to comply with what leaders decide; it influences people to think strategically and long-term to overcome our myopic short-term defaults.  

Injecting future-mindedness into decision processes, especially when the elephant in the room is undiscussed long-term risks, is a crucial act of leadership when stakes are as high as climate change.  

Well-managed collaboration identifies higher-quality solutions, makes higher-quality decisions, implements more effectively over time and has a higher impact. Especially as so many people feel helpless against climate change and want more control in their lives, collaborative work can boost confidence and perceived control, motivate sustained climate action, and improve health and well-being. 

Health and well-being, of course, will become ever-more serious casualties as so many influential leaders evade responsibility for climate action simply by maintaining current trajectories.

Effective climate and sustainability practices can be found in almost every industry. One useful resource in the nonprofit world is Project Drawdown, which considers every job a climate job and provides advice for workplaces, highlighting cross-unit collaboration opportunities. 

When more people view themselves as climate leaders and act accordingly, it will uncover diverse perspectives and solutions, strengthen our systems thinking, encourage networks and boundary-crossing collaborations and transcend disciplinary, organizational and geographic silos. These advances will generate the variety of approaches and paths needed to give us a fighting chance against our global threats. 

We need more than caring and hoping. We need more people leading, including unofficially but in a coordinated fashion from every corner. Climate change is a massive challenge, offering limitless opportunities to test, stretch and strengthen our personal competencies and collective leadership capacity.  

Taming climate change and the harm it causes would be a masterstroke of human agency and leadership. Reducing global heating will preserve the planet and forge a well-earned pride in our species.

Thomas S. Bateman is professor emeritus with the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia.

Michael E. Mann is a distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He is the author of the recently released book, “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.”