#pokolenieNCN – Karolina Safarzyńska: Evolution is against us in the fight against climate change

Karolina Safarzyńska, the next researcher in the series, investigates why efforts to bring emissions down are failing despite ever tighter climate policies – and looks for the answer in the way people influence each other.

The NCN Generation is made up of researchers whose work pushes back the frontiers of knowledge and changes our lives – improving health, protecting the environment, advancing technology and deepening our understanding of the world.

Karolina Safarzyńska is a professor at the Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw. She works in complexity economics and behavioural economics, and her theoretical models are used to design climate policy measures. She earned her PhD at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and has been a visiting researcher at, among others, the Santa Fe Institute – the birthplace of complexity economics – as well as completing traineeships at the UN, the WTO and the World Bank. In 2022 she received the NCN Award.

Preferences take shape in networks

Complexity economics starts from a different premise than the classical approach: rationality is not the only way of making decisions, but one of many modes of behaviour, one that comes into play under particular conditions. In practice, people are often prone to cognitive biases: when buying a car, for instance, they focus on the low purchase price, which looks rational at the time but, seen more broadly, leads to higher running costs and higher emissions. The crucial point, however, is that preferences change above all through social interaction – something classical economics leaves out. We live in a networked world that we cannot escape, one in which information reaching us from every side shapes our political preferences, our behaviour and our buying decisions.

This assumption is what sets her approach apart from mainstream economics. Classical models assume that preferences are fixed – a simplification, she points out, rather than a description of reality. Network models, by contrast, can capture phenomena such as the polarisation of opinion or the spread of consumer fashions.

Why good policies fail

Transport in Europe is subject to emission standards and to measures introduced at city level, yet over recent decades it has remained the only major sector in the EU whose emissions are higher today than in 1990. Karolina Safarzyńska explains this mismatch by pointing to preferences: people buy ever larger cars that burn more fuel even when they are more efficient, and as they grow wealthier they drive and fly more.

As she sees it, her criticism of the mainstream is aimed not at the policies themselves, but at the assumptions on which they are built. Mainstream economists, she argues, design policies that are “elegant and efficient”, and then blame the failure to implement them on an imperfect world or on a political crisis. She turns this reasoning on its head: if policies are socially unacceptable and cannot be introduced, then the question of why people reject them belongs inside the model itself. That is precisely what complexity economics examines – which measures will prove acceptable, and how preferences evolve.

Convenience as a climate mechanism

At the heart of the climate problem, on her account, lies our taste for convenience – a preference as deeply rooted in human nature as our fondness for sweet things. There is nothing wrong with an individual wanting a more comfortable life; the problem arises only at the collective level, when similar behaviours accumulate across whole societies. What interests her is not judging individual choices, but what follows from the fact that we all behave in much the same way.

She sees the same mechanism at work in consumer fashions – in the spread of SUVs across Europe, or in the high number of cars per capita in cities with good public transport. She looks for solutions not in appeals to individuals, but in macro-level policy: investment in renewable energy and regulation to curb the most emission-intensive behaviours. One example she gives is the ban on meat advertising in public spaces now being introduced by Dutch cities.

Climate as a network problem

The network view of the economy, she explains, grew out of the analysis of financial crises – and that is where complexity economics has had its greatest success. A financial crisis is a crisis of a network: banks lend to each other, so a fall in the value of one institution’s assets leaves it unable to meet its obligations and sets off systemic risk. Aggregate models built around a single representative agent cannot capture these dynamics. Climate change analysis, she believes, is heading the same way – although in climate policy this line of thinking is only just opening up.

The effectiveness of this way of thinking became clear, she recalls, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when infection dynamics were driven by the structure of social contacts rather than by aggregate indicators alone. Epidemiological models were good at predicting how the pandemic would unfold, but not at showing how to influence people’s behaviour within networks – and containing it depended on exactly that.

Research toolkit: networks of agents instead of a single individual

Karolina Safarzyńska’s research toolkit rests on large macroeconomic models. In place of the single abstract individual typical of classical models, she introduces whole networks of agents, whose behaviour she increasingly calibrates against empirical data. In one recent project, her team used network models and Austrian data to examine how consumers might nudge each other towards eating less meat and cutting emissions.

Selected quotes

Why the mainstream misses the bigger picture

We have perfect policies designed by mainstream economists, and emissions just keep going up. And they say: “It’s not our fault, the world is imperfect, we have this perfect policy but it can’t be implemented, it’s a political crisis, not an economic one.” But is that really the case? Why don’t our models take account of the fact that this policy is simply unacceptable – and why do we keep treating it as the only, optimal solution when we can’t actually put it in place?

Evolution against the climate

It’s really interesting that you used the word “convenience”, because that’s exactly what we struggle with most. Evolution really is completely against us in this fight against climate change. We like our comforts, and we’re going to keep chasing them. At the individual level, there’s nothing wrong with that. But at the meta level, I’m less interested in the individual and what they do than in what comes out of all of us behaving the same way, in tandem, and what problems that creates for the climate.

A degree of moderation

There are lots of areas where we could change our behaviour, but I don’t want to be the moraliser here, telling people: “Please don’t eat meat, please don’t fly, and please, heaven forbid, don’t get into a car.” There’s a middle ground, a kind of moderation we can all reach together.

Science as a collective effort

Sometimes, in all the competition for the best publications, the best theories, the citations, we lose sight of the fact that we’re working together on a problem that’s really complicated and needs some kind of collective effort. I was disappointed by the way science is evolving – as a highly competitive system built on individual success, one that doesn’t encourage the collective thinking we need to solve global problems.