As climate change progresses, we are beginning to feel some of the long-term impacts of our environmental negligence, but why did we ignore these environmental harms for so long? It appears that people undervalue the environmental impacts of their choices – but is this due to a lack of attention or awareness or is it that we judge the value of environmental outcomes in a fundamentally different manner?
The environmental ramifications of a person’s behavior are often delayed, probabilistic, and diffuse. This combination of attributes makes it easy to discount the importance of environmental risks. One approach to increase the importance or subjective value assigned to environmental risks could be to simply draw more attention or give more weight to environmental health. It may also be effective to frame environmental risks in terms of their threat to personal health or valuable property and infrastructure. To choose how to frame environmental risks, it is critical to understand if there are any differences in how the value of these different outcome domains changes in the face of delay or risk.