Human ‘behavioural crisis’ at root of climate breakdown, say scientists

New paper claims unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster

Record heat, record emissions, record fossil fuel consumption. One month out from Cop28, the world is further than ever from reaching its collective climate goals. At the root of all these problems, according to recent research, is the human behavioural crisis", a term coined by an interdisciplinary team of scientists.

We've socially engineered ourselves the way we geoengineered the planet," says Joseph Merz, lead author of a new paper which proposes that climate breakdown is a symptom of ecological overshoot, which in turn is caused by the deliberate exploitation of human behaviour.