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KATHMANDU, JANUARY 4
Behavioral insights offer effective tools to come up with innovative solutions to address people's behavior and biases regarding climate change. In recent years, behavioral science has been used to inform policies in many domains, involving economic growth, poverty reduction, job creation, public health, environmental protection, public safety, and crime reduction.
Behavioral science builds on decades of research in economics, psychology, and neuroscience, which shows that human beings are "boundedly rational" and they depart this rationality in systematic and predictable ways. In short, we live with predictable biases that can lead to a great deal of trouble.
People can suffer from present bias: The present matters a great deal, but the future might seem very far away, and people might not attend enough to it. In the case of climate change, many people have neglected longterm effects, focusing on today and tomorrow.
Present bias has made successful responses to climate change far more challenging to adopt.
A version of this article appears in the print on January 5, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.
