Ecological myopia: the blind spot holding back climate action |
Global debate about how to navigate the climate crisis often centres on high-level pledges and whether national targets are being met. Yet focusing on these technical outcomes obscures a deeper problem that keeps climate action falling short.
This problem is ecological myopia: treating climate change as one issue among many rather than as a sign of wider Earth system disruption. It narrows how we understand risk and allows politics, business and daily life to proceed as if planetary stability could still be taken for granted.
Set against the backdrop of a drying and burning Amazon, the UN climate summit in Brazil in November 2025 showed why this way of seeing no longer works.
Ecological myopia interprets climate change as a conventional environmental problem rather than as a planetary one. It assumes climate sits in a box labelled environment or sustainability while the rest of social and economic life sits in separate silos. But this is short sighted.
Political geoecology – an approach that sees politics as inseparable from the Earth’s ecological systems – offers one way to understand what this leaves out. The idea is that politics and ecology cannot be separated because modern societies are built into the Earth system through energy use, land change and industrial infrastructures. These connections shape climate risks and inequalities yet remain largely........