Climate optimism is a fairly new concept within the discourse about climate change, focusing on the potentially positive transformations the world can make in the face of climate change.

But climate optimism is at its most effective when it is fully informed and embracing the challenge before us in its entirety, not when it is being selective about which statistics to cite and which technological developments to emphasize.

The Dutch newspaper NRC published a story this past weekend breaking down some of the fallacies posed by certain climate optimists, namely:

  • one-sided data (i.e. sola panel adoption is growing, but fossil fuel consumption is also still growing)
  • overconfidence in “green capitalism” (wealthy countries where the economy as a whole grew while emissions fell, without acknowledging their historic reliance on fossil fuels)
  • selective science (the climate may only warm by 3 degrees at the end of the century now instead of 5, but more recent science indicates 3 degrees is worse than thought)
  • believing in the market and innovation at the exclusion of behavior change and degrowth

Our research on climate anxiety has found that optimism in the face of climate change is important because otherwise people can be paralyzed: only hearing the gloom and doom of the reality of melting ice caps and record-breaking temperatures without the additional context and perspective of possible solutions can make us feel like there’s no point and we may as well give up.

(Source: Climate Anxiety: A Research Agenda Inspired by Emotion Research
August 2023
Emotion Review (International Society for Research Emotion)
Anne M. van Valkengoed, Linda Steg, and Peter de Jonge

Valentina Lozano Nasi, our former colleague who defended her PhD thesis in 2023, coined a term which conveys this sense of urgency and its potential for positive change: transilience. It is the perceived capacity to persist, adapt flexibly and positively transform in the face of adversity, such as climate change risks.

(Source: Can we do more than “bounce back”? Transilience in the face of climate change risks
March 2023
Journal of Environmental Psychology
Valentina Lozano Nasi, Lise Jans, and Linda Steg)

Climate change is an existential threat and an opportunity to reassess our practices, challenge the status quo, and develop better ways of living. A series of studies showed that when people strongly perceive they can be transilient, they are more likely to take concrete action to adapt to climate change and to show better mental health.

Feeling as if you are acting alone can also cultivate a sense of futility: why aren’t institutions, systems and most other citizens doing as much to prevent climate change from getting worse as I am (or doing anything at all)?

There’s two aspects to this perception that Environmental Psychology can shed some light on:

  1. More people care about the climate than we typically assume. “Making people aware that others also strongly value the environment could be a critical strategy to motivate climate action, particularly for individuals that are not strongly personally motivated.”
    (Source: Environmental values and identities at the personal and group level
    December 2021
    Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences
    Thijs Bouman, Ellen van der Werff, Goda Perlaviciute, Linda Steg)
  1. Speaking out about your own pro-environmental actions makes it clearer to others that they’re not the only ones putting in so much effort.
    (Source: A spiral of (in)action: Empowering people to translate their values in climate action
    September 2022
    One Earth
    Thijs Bouman, Linda Steg)

As the climate optimists rightly point out, there are a lot of good things that are happening. But it’s still not nearly enough, and optimism should not lead to denial of the problems or a false sense of complacency: to achieve a better quality of life and mitigate climate change’s worse case scenarios, action is needed on all fronts now.

Photo by Simon Berger