This opinion piece positions SG’s new role on the WEF Global Future Council on Human Science of Environmental Action within a wider narrative about human behaviour as a driver of climate solutions. The article highlights how meaningful environmental change begins with people, emphasising learning, social influence and behavioural science.
The monumental challenges facing humanity, such as climate change, human-induced environmental degradation, threats to biodiversity and ecosystems seem like a list without an end. There are problems of such enormity that confronting them requires effort on an equally massive scale. It is not surprising that when we discuss solutions to the climate crisis, we tend to think in planetary terms. The scale feels incomprehensibly vast, as though only superhuman intervention can address it.
This framing, however, misses a crucial insight: The intrinsically human scale of the solution. The solution starts with us as individuals.
First, we each must acknowledge that systems change fastest when society changes first; each of us has a right and a responsibility to help bring about those changes. Next, we have to remember that progress will only begin when we burst the “normative” bubbles that keep us in uncertainty and lacking self-belief. Human behaviours are of increasingly planetary importance right now.
Our beliefs, ambitions and our actions create social influence that is then able to affect the global environmental discourse. Our leadership need our support to design corresponding financial incentives and policies surrounding adaptation and mitigation. In times of uncertainty we follow those we trust — and again, that puts solutions to climate change on a very personal level. We need to see other people supporting sustainability and know that many more are.
Immediately after 45,000 people gathered in Belem at COP30 to discuss climate change, you might think that what the world needs least right now is another committee to discuss urgent matters. But we need one urgently, to help deliver more powerful and pervasive communication — better channels and better arguments brought to bear — to create the widest mandate for change.
Without doubt we need climatologists, engineers, marine biologists and experts across every scientific discipline and every ecosystem. Furthermore, we rely on policy experts and diplomats to turn that knowledge into actionable directions. But there is a human tipping point: each of us, if empowered by our individual sense of judgement and engaged by social proofs, will prove increasingly important in determining the outcome. When societies change, so will their systems.
Resources must be increased in order to win that behaviour dialectic between sustainability or decay. The measures of climate adaptation and mitigation — of reasonable living, of sustainable livelihoods — aren't distant abstractions. Sustainable moderation is a very human, personable concept, and is not hard to comprehend. Extrapolating an individual’s input into that of a community is not impossible either — and that is where persuasion starts.
Such thinking is known as human science and is ever more important, particularly when it describes and explores Environmental Action. This encompasses the wholly vital communication and influence on many different levels and subjects, but all with a singular goal: To continue encouraging, engaging and enabling climate adaptation and mitigation.
I have personal experience of how effective it can be. As Secretary General of the Environment Agency — Abu Dhabi, we have overcome obstacles — such as saving our fishing stocks from over-fishing — purely by opening positive dialogues with key stakeholders. Good communication can and does yield excellent results.
This is precisely what human science offers: discovering optimal ways to learn, teach, cajole and inspire our way toward better living. Creating and curating the ecosystem of persuasion, recycling not naïveté but proven methods to understand the potential consequences of our daily choices, for ourselves and for others.
The recovery of Abu Dhabi’s fisheries is perfect living proof. When stocks plummeted to just eight per cent of sustainable levels in 2018, behavioural interventions, co-designed with fishermen, completely changed the trajectory.
Through dialogue, enforcement, social proof and shared responsibility, sustainable fish stocks rebounded to 97 per cent — one of the world’s fastest documented recoveries. This was not achieved by science nor policy alone. It was achieved because human behaviour shifted.
Evidently, ordinary citizens can effect change. Through the fundamental mechanism of how communities function: learning from one another to make better choices. Ethical consumerism works. By understanding which harmful practices to avoid in your weekly shopping, your actions create environmental pressure on manufacturers and suppliers to modify their behaviour.
The evidence is compelling: Collective action, informed by accessible information, achieving tangible results. When enough people want change and encourage policies and practices that align with their popular, educated demand, the markets respond. Corporations adapt. Systems shift.
We witnessed this same behavioural shift in Abu Dhabi when we introduced the Single-Use Plastic Policy. What began as an environmental regulation quickly became a social movement. People brought reusable bags, retailers adapted and public sentiment shifted towards collective responsibility. Consumption patterns changed in months, not years, demonstrating again that when communities change, systems follow.
As a result, the numbers speak for themselves with 490 million single use plastic bags avoided since the ban in 2022 and 95 per cent decrease in the number of grocery bags used, while 267 million single use plastic bottles have been recovered since 2023 after the introduction of 170 Reverse Vending Machines and Smart Bins.
To put this into perspective, 7,386 tonnes of plastic have been avoided or recovered for recycling and 116,000 tonnes of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) eliminated which is the equivalent to removing 185,620 cars from the roads in one year.
Learning may appear overly simplistic as a solution — it is anything but. We must consider learning and dialogue as key infrastructure — and entirely vital. Very simply, without such discourse, we can not progress, and we will all suffer.
Deploying our collective capacity to learn better, teach better and persuade more effectively represents our most promising path toward delivering on the frameworks and agreements, roadmaps and policies necessary for adaptation and mitigation. We do care — but do we care enough to learn how to fight climate change and protect our environment better? The answer, for our future generations must always be yes.
This is the work ahead: Not waiting for planetary-scale interventions, but embracing the power of human-scale action — one informed choice, merging many communities into one community, one movement at a time.
Her Excellency Dr Shaikha Salem Al Dhaheri, Secretary General, Environment Agency, Abu Dhabi and newly appointed Council Member of World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Human Science of Environmental Action.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.