Acting responsibly: from Covid to the climate and ecological crisis

The Covid pandemic looked, in some ways, like an age of altruism. Around us, we saw widespread acceptance of responsibilities for the welfare of others. The urgency of the pandemic and the legal and social supports that emerged worked in favour of this altruism. Hopes were expressed that pandemic 'neighbourliness' marked a change in our social and political culture that would endure, and spread. It has not done so. 

Such concern for others, now and in the future, is much less evident in relation to the climate and ecological crisis. What lessons can be learned from responses to the pandemic and its aftermath, to help us think about our responsibilities in relation to the environment?

Understanding altruism in the pandemic

For many people, especially those who were young and healthy, compliance with lockdown rules meant both emotional and financial costs, primarily for the benefit of others. They had to miss social and family contacts – some of which, such as hospital visits, were hard to bear. People working in health and social care, transport workers, food deliverers, and emergency services and cleaning staff all had responsibilities to keep going to work despite the known risks. 

Of course, legal sanctions affected compliance, but most people complied willingly (Wright et al., 2022), on the basis of a desire to do the right thing. How did this desire come about? 

In an earlier article for The Psychologist, we suggested that this altruism could be seen as the outcome of moral reasoning as described by James Rest in his four-component model (Bebeau et al., 1999; Narvaez & Rest, 1995). 

The first component is moral sensitivity; people recognised that they were confronted by moral issues, and not just personal interests, practicality or safety. During the pandemic, people faced moral choices not just about their immediate social or professional circles but also about unknown numbers of unknown others. 

Second, there was moral reasoning; being clear about the moral course of action. Examples include social distancing, and key workers in health and other sectors continuing to work despite knowledge of the risks they faced. 

Third was moral motivation; acknowledging and weighing up the various considerations, moral and otherwise. Fourth was moral implementation; bringing together moral reasoning and moral motivation to make and act on moral decisions. 

What helped people to make moral choices during the pandemic? Firstly, the crisis was sudden and very visible; an obvious crisis that required urgent action. Secondly, there were legal pressures for prosocial behaviour; the state created a framework that supported moral reasoning. There were also social prompts and support. 

Compliance with lockdown rules and guidance was steered by massive daily news media coverage of casualties, trends and the expectations of all of us. 'Covid heroes' (but by no means all of them) were identified and praised. Doing the right thing was publicly celebrated in national and social media. 

Psychologists participated in the media response. Steve Reicher (2024), for instance, at the time and later, stressed the importance of local community, belongingness and trust, as well as national identity and doing something for the nation. Local communities rallied to support vulnerable people. The website MutualAid.co.uk lists 2,047 local mutual aid groups that arose during Covid. There was a culture of collectivity rather than individualism. 

For a brief moment, societies displayed greater solidarity and care. Many people, including one of us (Paxton, 2020), expected this selflessness to continue. So why didn't it? As political theorist David Runciman commented (2024), they were 'fairytale hopes' based on wishful thinking – expecting the continuation of a different pattern of social relationships that was detached from the real social world. When the pandemic eased the compassion and altruism that emerged to tackle it dissolved. 

What's different about the climate and ecological crisis

It is evident that the climate and ecological crisis has arrived, and it presents similar but far greater economic, material and moral challenges. People are losing their homes, livelihoods, wellbeing and their lives. Species are facing extinction. It's also an injustice on a global scale. The richest continue to consume and pollute, while those who have done least to create the crisis and are least able to deal with it suffer most and soonest (Hickel, 2020). 

Yet the public response to this crisis is largely to ignore it and carry on as usual. Why have public responses to the two crises been so different? We think it's that Covid was a visible, urgent crisis, with state, media and community support to enable people to respond in a morally apt way. The climate crisis does not have these features.

For most of us in the Global North it doesn't feel like a crisis; it mostly just feels as if the weather is getting warmer, wetter and more changeable. We're presented with growing evidence of devastating changes but they are mostly far away and affect populations that the white majority in the North does not feel moved to act in solidarity with. Also, climate science is abstract and difficult for laypersons to understand, and it is not always communicated in an accessible way.

Secondly, covid compliance and altruism were prompted and guided by massive daily news media coverage, but, by contrast, public information regarding the climate and ecological crisis is largely reassuring. The UK government still says it expects to hit its net zero targets, and around the world, no governments are taking significantly more urgent actions (Poynting, 2024). 

Climate and environmental activists are portrayed as an inconvenience. Weather-related catastrophes are portrayed as natural disasters rather than caused by human-induced climate change. Climate-related issues and incidents are often far down the news agenda, whereas Covid was headline news.

Thirdly, the external support for doing the right thing in the pandemic is absent. The most visible support for prosocial Covid actions was the legal requirement for compliance with lockdown rules. By contrast, it is legal for all of us – countries, companies and individuals – to carry on polluting and destroying in many ways. A pandemic had been predicted for years by the World Health Organization, World Bank and others, but ignored by governments until the suddenness of Covid made that (eventually) impossible. 

The climate and ecological crisis is accelerating but still developing much more slowly than Covid did. It is only when a crisis becomes an emergency that governments feel compelled to act. Political systems promote short-term thinking because politicians are elected or re-elected in the next cycle. Long-term strategic planning does not win votes. 

The informal social support for change is also lacking. Compared with the evident normality of altruistic behaviour and unavoidable public support for it during the pandemic, there are few prompts to change in this crisis. For individual citizens, our current lifestyles and expectations contribute to maintaining inactivity by most of us. 

Moreover, for individuals, what exactly we should be doing is much less clear than it was during the pandemic, and so moral reasoning about the climate and ecological crisis is harder. The lack of social norms encouraging pro-climate behaviour is also matched by weak popular pressure on governments to change. Most people are content to carry on as usual.

But probably the biggest reason for political inaction is economic; the power and obvious influence of the fossil fuel industry seeking to maintain their colossal short-term profits. For instance, more than 2456 fossil fuel lobbyists were given access to the COP28 negotiations in 2023 – four times the number admitted to COP27 the previous year, and outnumbering by seven to one the representatives of indigenous peoples (Lakhani, 5/12/2023). Individual behavioural change is not enough. Systemic change is required.

Rethinking responsibility

Moral reasoning during the pandemic was unusual and difficult because it concerned risks to unknown numbers of unknown people, but despite this, everyone could see that their actions could have a direct and seriously damaging effect on others. Reasoning about individual moral responsibilities in the climate and ecological crisis is different. From an individual's perspective, the law doesn't provide guidance and there is no clear causal sequence from my actions to any noticeable effect on the crisis, such as climate breakdown or species loss. 

It is perfectly legal for me to take frequent hot baths, drive a large SUV and fly business class all over the world. What exactly am I guilty of, and why should I be blamed? What particular harm am I causing? Who exactly am I hurting? I could say that, on the contrary, I'm doing good by giving the economy a boost. How should I frame the moral questions here? 

The solution is to think about responsibility in a different way, and Iris Marion Young's notion of structural injustice (2011) is a helpful guide. The climate crisis is an example of structural injustice; that is, the (largely) unintended cumulative result of everyday accepted actions on the part of diverse agents, at different times and places, all mostly acting within accepted rules and norms, but leading to domination or oppression, and in this case, physical harm, suffered by certain social groups. 

Climate change exacerbates the existing structural injustice of global poverty, which includes material deprivation, marginalisation from the global economy, powerlessness and structural violence (McKeown, 2024). It also fosters insecurity: 'insecurity of life, livelihood, access to the means of subsistence, inability to plan for the future for oneself and one's family, insecurity of place and home, and undermining the preservation of culture. All of this affects individuals' capacities for self-development, which is why it's a form of oppression (McKeown, 2024, p.103). 

We are all connected; through the globalised economy, global media, global political institutions and of course the biosphere. We thereby contribute to the processes that produce these unjust outcomes. Young identified a new kind of responsibility to explain our responsibility for structural injustice; the social connection model. 

Through these connections we bear responsibility, but we are not to blame for structural injustice. Young's sense of responsibility is different in rejecting the usual backwards-looking focus on blame. Instead, we should look outwards to consider how we contribute to the injustice and then forward to what we should and can do to counter it. Young calls this 'political responsibility'. 

Young argued that everyone connected to structural injustice shares political responsibility for it. But one of us (McKeown, 2024) has argued that the responsibilities of ordinary citizens are different in both kind and extent from those of governments and extracting and polluting organisations. The conduct of these organisations in knowingly continuing to act as they do is clearly immoral. The responsibility of ordinary individuals is to push those powerful agents for change.

The 'disruption nexus'

The Covid pandemic gives us reasons to be optimistic in expecting most people to want to do the right thing if they've thought about it in an appropriate way and are given the right kind of state and societal support. We should begin with clear thinking about the crisis. Do we agree that it is in fact a crisis? The definition of a crisis is a point or time for deciding. If it is a crisis – a decisive moment, a turning point – decisions must follow.

As Raworth (2018), Hickel (2022), Jackson (2021) and others have shown, continuing consumption as usual, feeding the economic growth (green or otherwise) that the current model of capitalism requires, means continuing exponential growth in material and energy use. It is simply inconceivable that it can continue endlessly, but this obvious fact is dealt with by collective denial or political deceit, for short-term financial and electoral reasons, and the continuing enrichment of elites. We need different values and a commitment to transition to a different political and economic system if we are to make the necessary changes. 

Historian and political scientist Roman Krznaric (2024) uses a long timescale to find evidence on the processes through which radical societal changes of the kind needed occur. Three components are needed to create what he calls the 'disruption nexus'. Rapid transformative change is most likely when there is a crisis together with realistic plans for a better way, and radical disruptive movements that challenge power holders. 

These three requirements are present in the climate and ecological crisis. There is certainly a crisis (even if we need more widespread social agreement on this), there are clear proposals for realistic alternatives, and there is a disruptive 'radical flank' (Krznaric, 2024) in the form of organisations like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.

The radical flank of disruptive peaceful protest causes great inconvenience, is widely criticised, has recently been subject to severe legal punishment, and is generally seen as failing to benefit its own cause. But against this apparently widespread view there is firm evidence that protests, including climate protests, influence public opinion, voting behaviour, media reporting and the attention and communications of MPs (Barrie et al. 2024). Krznaric argues that these disruptive movements are effective not just in drawing attention to their cause but also in shifting the terms of the debate and making less radical demands more acceptable than they would otherwise have been. 

Some people are in fact taking up their political responsibility for the climate crisis. Rosie Jones (2020), in these pages, has given a very personal expression of these issues from the standpoint of a Psychologist. Such activists are pushing for changes to the law, and bringing public and media attention to the crisis. In other words, climate activists are trying to create some of the legal and social changes we saw during Covid, creating the necessary legal and social framework to enable individuals to act to alleviate the crisis rather than accelerate it. 

The role of the profession and society

In the psychology profession, we can learn from and be encouraged by the work of individual psychologists and the British Psychological Society during the Covid pandemic. Prominent psychologists with appropriate specialist expertise appeared frequently in news media providing comments and evidence-based advice on staying safe and healthy – mentally and physically. 

The society collaborated with sister organisations across Europe (via the European Federation of Psychologists' Associations), rapidly developing and making available guidance materials promoting safe psychological practice and personal wellbeing. We were able to be effective. Psychologists can do the same for the climate crisis. 

A starting point is rekindling Covid's spirit of collective solidarity for our shared future – when 'we' prevailed over 'me' (Krznaric, 2024). The well-established COM-B model links capability, opportunity and motivation as the psychological requirements for behaviour change, and more recently the model has been integrated within the wider framework of 'the behaviour change wheel' (Michie et al., 2011), encompassing the kinds of policy changes and wider interventions required for widespread behaviour change. 

Organisational actions of various kinds are also clearly essential. As McKeown (2024) argues, corporate agents with the power to effect change have a moral responsibility to do so. Civil society organisations like the BPS can contribute to influencing public opinion and, from that, political action. And the society does bear and accept this moral responsibility to address the climate crisis. 

Its Climate and Environment Action Coordinating Group (CEACG) was established to lead, coordinate and strengthen the efforts of us as individuals and as members of the various groups and elements within the society. Crucially, the CEACG's workplan includes influencing public policy through working with other stakeholders including politicians and relevant organisations (BPS, 2023). 

Other parts of the workplan mirror the Society's work in the pandemic. The CEACG will work with networks within the BPS to develop and focus work on the health and wellbeing effects of the crisis, and to promote awareness, public discussion and behaviour change. This will include producing guidance and educational materials. We will develop closer relationships with relevant organisations, institutions and leaders to energise and contribute psychological knowledge to policy making. 

We will promote the voices of people and communities who are least heard and most affected. There is a commitment to long-term championing of the work led by the CEACG. In other words, the BPS can also contribute to creating the social norms and legal-political frameworks that can support the public in adopting pro-climate and ecologically sound behaviours. 

Our optimism, however, needs to be tempered by recognising the failures of the Covid response. We must not overlook the glaring injustice in the responses to Covid. Geographical, ethnic, social and economic status all greatly affected covid risks and outcomes. 

These factors dictated the delivery and quality of preventive and treatment measures and led to major differences in outcomes (see for instance Ruger, 2020). Recognition of the impacts of any crisis must be sensitive to existing structural injustices in society. Those existing structural inequalities must be integrated into responses from the outset.

All is connected

It may seem impossible to imagine modern life without the consumption-driven growth-pursuing capitalism fuelled and required by the carbon economy, but for previous generations, other features of their lives which must have seemed similarly fixed and essential were overturned. Slavery, the disenfranchisement of women, empires, and feudalism to name just a few. 

But legacies of past injustice live on in present ongoing structural injustice including the marginalisation of people of African descent, misogyny, neocolonialism, and a class-based economic system. All structural injustices are interconnected, including the topics of this article. In thinking about both Covid and the climate and ecological crisis we shouldn't forget the causal links between them and between the climate crisis and other possible future pandemics. 

The warmer climate affects many infectious diseases in various ways, disrupting infrastructure and health systems and increasing migration, as well as expanding the range of disease-carrying insects (Nicholas, 2023). These dangers are more significant for people in the Global South and marginalised communities in all countries. 

This is yet another reminder of the seriousness of the current predicament. Urgent, coordinated and politically informed action is essential. The pandemic is an important source from which we can learn in order to see and accept our responsibilities.

Roger Paxton PhD CPsychol FBPsS is a member of the BPS Climate and Environment Action Co-ordinating Group. He is a retired clinical psychologist and past Chair of the BPS Ethics Committee.

Maeve McKeown PhD is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Groningen. Her main research interests are structural injustice, historical injustice and feminism.

Key sources

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