Beware of small world model thinking

One of the reasons we’ve been talking and trying to tackle climate change for so long is that it’s a very complicated problem. Indeed, a lot of people call it a wicked problem.

When thinking about something as climate change, including when it comes to trying to solve climate change, we can’t think about it holistically in all its complexity. That leads us to simplify it in our own minds. This simplification results in what can be called small-world models that we apply to our thinking about climate change, including climate solutions.

While small world models are invaluable tools for making sense of the world, they inherently possess limitations due to their simplified nature, and decision-making experts emphasize that we should not rely on small world models as if they were true representations of reality. Instead they are useful abstractions that help us understand a complex system. Relying on them too much can cause us to think about a problem in ways that ultimately do not represent reality.

When it comes to tackling climate change, it’s easy to identify small world models that guide much of our thinking.

• The idea that all we have to do to tackle climate change is to get concerned people to vote for climate-friendly candidates.
• The idea that voluntary emissions reduction efforts by nations, companies, and individuals will decarbonize the world and solve climate change.
• That idea that ramping up the use of carbon offsets by 10 or 100 times is the way to solve climate change.
• The idea that voluntary risk disclosures will cause companies and investors to fundamentally change their behaviors in ways that ultimately solve climate change.
• The idea that suing fossil fuel companies for being responsible for climate change will lead to global decarbonization and solving climate change.

In each case these very simple mental models of how the world works will result in policy proposals that cannot succeed because they don’t adequately represent the complexity of the real world when it comes to energy sector, climate change, and the incentives governing climate change decision-making.

As we seek to understand why we are where we are today when it comes to climate change, and how to accelerate progress towards a low-carbon economy, we should recognize the limitiations of these and other small world models. Even if we can’t internalize all the complexity of the real world in our thinking, we need to think as holistically as we can - this is commonly referred to as systems-thinking.

That is the purpose of Your Climate Change Toolbox. It organizes all kinds of information to help you get beyond small world model thinking.