Global teamwork saved the ozone layer — where’s the unity on climate change?

Wild fluctuations in temperature, droughts, flooding, snowstorms, wildfires and other unusual weather phenomena have many worrying about what is in store for 2022 as our climate lurches from one extreme to the other.   

Making matters worse, it is expected that several developed nations will fall short of the nationally determined contributions (NDCs) they committed to during the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Conclusions from last year’s 26th session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties in Glasgow included the first five-year review of NDC performance. Writing for Chatham House, an independent policy institute, Professor Tim Benton argues that “genuine urgency and a willingness to match words with action and to close the yawning gap between pledges and detailed, short-term plans is still missing.”  

Why can’t the world seem to get anything done on climate? While the Biden administration’s attention to the climate is a welcome change, continued political polarization makes the probability of concrete policy action remote.  

This current state is frustrating when you consider that it wasn’t that long ago when the world successfully rallied around a different climate threat — ozone depletion. 

As one of the only universally ratified treaties, the U.N.’s 1987 Montreal Protocol is often lauded as an exemplar of international policy that effectively established a framework for international climate cooperation. In addition to establishing a first-of-its-kind collaborative consensus, research shows that the Montreal Protocol was also effective in actually reducing human climate impacts. By 2000, the trend of Antarctic stratosphere ozone depletion began to pause or reverse. A 2020 article in Nature concludes that “the pause in circulation trends is forced by human activities” and “that stratospheric ozone recovery, resulting from the Montreal Protocol, is the key driver of the pause.” Scientists have also found that in addition to reducing ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and facilitating the long-term repair of the ozone hole, the Montreal Protocol substantially impacted surface cooling projections and supported substantial mitigation of climate effects.  

What is so different now that such agreement seems beyond reach? What has happened over the last 35 years that makes international consensus — and even agreement around a basic set of climate facts — so difficult?   

A clear difference is the role media plays in today’s public square and the ways in which media siphon trust from social institutions. Many have studied how media influences public opinion and support for certain policies. Scholars have developed concepts like focusing events, triggering devices, and tipping events to describe how media coverage of a specific event activates public opinion in ways that influence policymakers’ approaches to solutions. The difference today is that media narratives of such events are often blurred by partisan political frames that direct attention away from solutions. And too often people’s minds are made up on issues (particularly around climate change) long before media narratives develop around specific climate-related events.  

In the 1980s, an image of a “hole” in the ozone layer above Antarctica kicked off a series of events leading to the ratification of the Montreal Protocol. Forty years later, increasingly erratic weather patterns and other climate-related disasters don’t seem to have a similar effect on public opinion. Today, political affiliation is strongly correlated with an individual’s perspectives on climate threats. This challenge is heightened when considering other research showing that as our political parties become ever more polarized, people increasingly rely primarily on validating media sources. Acknowledging this growing divide, a 2020 Pew Research Center report concludes: “What’s unique about this moment — and particularly acute in America — is that these divisions have collapsed onto a singular axis where we find no toehold for common cause or collective national identity.” 

In a work recently published in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, I propose that approaches to today’s thorny policy challenges must incorporate the upstream influences of media and public trust. As far back as Rousseau’s invocation of the social contract, political scientists have acknowledged that the strength of any political system rests in the peoples’ willingness to accept the legitimacy of competing perspectives and readiness to acquiesce to the majority in efforts to contribute to the greater good. However, actual policy processes often overlook how the confluence of public trust and public attention increasingly influences the processes necessary for any political agreement.

Growing distrust in democratic institutions and increasing animus toward political opposition jeopardize the preconditions of our democracy and increase the likelihood that disaffected groups will refuse any consensus view, a natural consequence of emphasizing individual rights at the cost of the general will and the common good. This toxic mix makes addressing politically challenging issues like climate policy almost impossible. 

Therefore, a static extension of the successful Montreal Protocol framework to include the objectives of the Paris Agreement, without considering the contemporary factors that influence public trust, just won’t work. We need to consider how measures of trust in media can be used to better understand support for scientists and respect for technical experts and policymakers.  

Political polarization is another critical factor as increased media freedom and distrust in media go hand-in-hand with higher levels of partisanship. Even when sufficient media freedom and trust in media exist, partisan polarization affects how information is interpreted and can put downward pressure on climate policy considerations. Absent context and understanding, these levels of distrust and partisanship limit the potential for policy action to address climate change.  

In this situation, attention must be paid to upstream factors — those that form the context in which policy is made. Consequently, building trust in media and institutions of government becomes critical preconditions to any ambitious policy agenda, particularly those that require real or perceived sacrifices for the collective good.  

This upstream work must start now. Demonizing political opponents isn’t debate. Respectful exchanges of perspective will be required to build the trust required for policy action. Unless there is a pause in the fighting to allow for an honest exchange of views — unless we build trust — the likelihood of global climate policy action is vanishingly small.  

Stephen P. Groff is the governor of Saudi Arabia’s National Development Fund (NDF). He has written extensively on climate and development-related issues. The views expressed in this commentary are his and do not reflect NDF policy. Twitter: @spgroff