Climate Change:

We Forget We Have Solved Similar Problems Before

© Dave Finnigan, June 2009

davefinnigan@yahoo.com

Background - A huge stumbling block for the Climate Change community is that we
seem to be approaching this great cause as if humans had never solved any problem like
this before. Our response is to keep doing what is easy, instead of what will work. It is
easy to focus on raising awareness and to put ads on TV showing the problem and
mentioning some incremental approaches to the solution, like windmills or solar
installations, or hybrid cars. It is easy to marshal our forces to call Senators and
Congresspersons asking them to pass a particular piece of legislation.

What is not being done because it is more difficult is to move masses of people, the
citizenry, up the path from Awareness, to Interest, to Evaluation, to Trial, to Adoption
and on to Advocacy – the well-worn path of adoption of any innovation. This is the path
that has been taken whenever innovations have been successfully introduced including
postage stamps, compulsory free education, hybrid rice strains and family planning in the
Third World. Yet we seem to have not reached back into our collective past and brought
forward this vast store of memory. Instead we seem to be flailing around as a
community, trying to effect change by merely raising awareness.

A Model for Proceeding - In this short paper I want to make a plea for a more rigorous
planning paradigm. It is axiomatic that good tactics can win a battle, and good strategy
can win a campaign, but only good logistical thinking can win a war. I contend that it is
time to think long term and logistically.

The seminal thinker in the field of innovation and diffusion was Professor Everett M
Rogers, 1931-2004. Rogers book, The Diffusion of Innovations, published in 1962 is
absolutely current in terms of the model he describes. Rogers contended that adoption of
any innovation occurs in five stages:

1. Awareness,
2. Interest,
3. Evaluation,
4. Trial, and
5. Adoption.

My own past work, undertaken through discussions with Rogers, adds a sixth step to the
paradigm --- Advocacy --- the stage in which an adopter becomes a vocal advocate,
helping to move a community of peers forward through the five steps. That creates a
feedback loop to accelerate change. My work during the successful adoption of family
planning in South Korea and Taiwan from 1967 through 1972, and during the less
successful efforts to bring family planning to the Philippines from 1972 through 1975, all
convince me that non-material and material incentives can accelerate the process. Those
experiences also showed that a culture of change needs to be created and sustained in the
larger society, to make the transformations that are required socially, politically,
economically, and even spiritually acceptable.

Therefore, it is time to experiment in the US and elsewhere with procedures that have
worked in the past in a variety of cultures, to help move citizens through the climate
change transition.

Rogers popularized the following diagram, showing how an innovation is typically

diffused through the population. It fits well with the 16% plus percentage of the
population that self-identifies as “Climate Change Denialists,” the “Laggards” to the right
of the curve. They won’t be swayed, though some of their children or spouses will be. In
any case the best strategy is to focus elsewhere, except to alleviate their concerns that we
are “moving toward socialism,” or that we are “going to break the bank.” Next comes the
Late Majority. They will only come aboard after the innovators, early adopters and early
majority have bought in and have proven the validity of the new concept. So again, an
optimum strategy focuses elsewhere, except to engage them once they have seen that the
changes are acceptable to at least some of their neighbors and friends.

[from http://susanlucas.com/it/images/categories.gif]

My belief is that what we need to do next is to use incentives of all sorts to get the
innovators and early adopters to make the personal behavioral changes that will lead to a
lower carbon footprint, lower energy costs, and lower use of scarce resources – and to do
this early on for themselves and their families. This will encourage the Early Majority to
climb aboard, with the assistance of small public incentives and awards. Late adopters
and laggards may never change their lifestyles, so the place to start is to focus on those
who will make the changes now because they are already true believers or could become
believers with very little effort. That shows that “others are doing it.” It changes the
behavioral environment that surrounds the others. As with the historic decline of
smoking, there comes a tipping point where something new is now “the thing to do – or
not to do.” The cause of climate change involves both.

Rogers also discussed what he called the perceived characteristics of innovations. These
are factors considered by potential adopters that affect how likely they are to move up the
scale from Awareness to Adoption and on to Advocacy. They are:

• Relative advantage (the ‘degree to which an innovation is perceived as being

better than the idea it supersedes’);
• Compatibility (‘the degree to which an innovation is perceived to be consistent
with the existing values, past experiences and needs of potential adopters’);
• Complexity (‘the degree to which an innovation is perceived as difficult to use’);
• Trialability (‘the opportunity to experiment with the innovation on a limited
basis’); and
• Observability (‘the degree to which the results of an innovation are visible to
others’).

Innovations that have greater relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, and

observability, along with less complexity, will generally be adopted over innovations that
do not. That is why it is easy to get households to change light bulbs, which are visible to
everyone who comes into a house. But it is more difficult to get them to reinsulated the
house by blowing insulation into the walls and attic, a procedure that is not observable,
relatively complex, and not trialable on a small scale by a householder. If we can
simplify and improve the visibility and trialability of any procedure we will be able to
win more adherents.

However we discovered in the Family Planning programs in East Asia that we often
could bypass the trial period and go straight to adoption with the selective use of awards
and incentives. In our work with households on making changes to fit a new low-carbon
lifestyle we should be considering the incentives needed for each adaptation that we are
asking families to undertake, using Rogers’ work and the work of others who have been
using his model in public health and rural redevelopment programs worldwide.

Recommendation – It is suggested that a working group be convened to bring to bear the

work of Everett Rogers, with members drawn from family planning program
administrators, public health practitioners, and experts in rural redevelopment. Such a
group can hammer out lessons learned from past experiences to be applied to the cause
of Climate Change action --- for the US population and others around the world in a
systematic way.

For a thorough exploration of the Diffusion of Innovations which was the basis for the
Green Revolution, for the diffusion of public health measures and family planning action
in the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations;
and http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2007/06/diffusion_of_in.html