There are concerns that climate change attention is waning as competing global threats intensify. Spisak analyzed billions of anonymized and aggregated posts on Facebook in the US from August 2019 to December 2020. He found an 80% decrease in climate change content sharing and resharing as COVID-19 spread during the spring of 2020.
Core problems
The core problems highlighted in his research are on the one hand a lack of systemic sustainability - i.e., systemically prioritizing preparedness over short-term costs and benefits. On the other hand, Spisak sees collapsing systems competing for attention rather than complementing and reinforcing each other.
Prioritizing short-term costs and benefits over mid- and long-term preparedness leads to multiple, overlapping crises. This chaos is hard to keep track of and society tends to focus on one problem or the other, according to Spisak.
Long-term focus
Instead, society needs to focus on systemic sustainability where a diverse group of people from climate activists to public health advocates collectively demand preparedness over short-term costs and benefits. Spisak: 'We need immunologist Anthony Fauci and climate activist Greta Thunberg on the same page!'
The paper named 'Large-scale decrease in the social salience of climate change during the COVID-19 pandemic' is published in PLOS ONE and can be read in full here.