Climate change is a global crisis which demands cooperation at a scale never encountered before – cooperation on all levels of the global human society to reduce our carbon emissions:

Within families and at the workplace we need to help each other to find ways to minimize our energy consumption, considering each other’s needs and being willing to compromise. Within larger units – such as universities, towns, and cities – different departments, businesses, industries and organizations need to cooperate and act for the greater good not for their own self-interest. Nations will need to cooperate and transfer technologies so that all countries in the world can acquire the standards needed to deal with the tasks ahead.

If we cannot be successful on every single one of these levels, then fast and effective changes will be hard to reach. Why is such close cooperation so hard to achieve?

It often seems that we have not yet truly recognized the ultimate reason for our efforts – avoiding a planetary catastrophe of unprecedented scale. If the path out of the crisis causes a person, group, city, or nation to be recognized by the world for having done a good job, and if it helps produce funding or jobs or profits, that’s a great side effect. But – I believe – self-enhancing thinking might not be the most effective reason for acting, because such thinking excludes others, and reduces the so urgently needed cooperation.

If we could for a moment step away from our capitalistic, self-enhancing world view, and look straight into what the future holds for us in case of inaction – how can we still be eager to maximize our personal or national profit?

Of course, cooperation is not well established in human nature. Is it? Surprisingly, a recent article in ScienceDaily describes the contrary: A study by psychologists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem actually showed that, when given the choice, participants of a test group were interested in helping their own group without harming an other test group. This study thus indicated that people – when given the choice – do prefer to cooperate.

The question though remains – if we do want to cooperate, why don’t we do a better job in doing so?

I believe the difference between the study and the real world is: Fear. The participants of the test did not have to fear any potentially negative results of their cooperation. However, in the real world many people – especially in the US – are driven by fear. And the result of fear is a lack of trust. Such lack of trust is ubiquitous among friends, colleagues, and businesses. But if we cannot trust each other on a small scale, how will we ever reach the trust that is needed for cooperation among nations?

I believe the main question thus is: how can we learn to trust one another? If all of us would be honest and trusting, the sense of trust might be able to wedge out the sense of fear and mistrust that has so much pervaded our world. And from there we could set to work – in a productive cooperative spirit that would greatly spur the development and exchange of ideas to win the race against anthropogenic global climate change.

Maiken Winter

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