How to free your bandwidth for what matters
Facts: Food vs. people and planet? 🌾👩🌾🌍 | Feelings: Resolute 🦬 | Action: Reassess social media 📲
Welcome to We Can Fix It, where we tackle the climate crisis with facts, feelings, and action, written by me, climate scientist Kim Nicholas.
Hi friends, this month I’m sharing our new rural report card for European agriculture, feeling resolute in a global leadership vacuum, and questioning my relationship with social media.
Facts: Food vs. people and planet?
To achieve a climate-safe and sustainable world, we must measure and incentivize sustainability outcomes, like reducing greenhouse gas emissions and protecting high-nature value farmland.
Measuring outcomes is essential because it tracks progress and holds policymakers accountable. But too often, analyses focus on actions (like applying fertilizer), without examining their effects. (That’s why I focus on high-impact climate actions!)
In my research, I aim to connect policies and practices with measurable outcomes that assess their effectiveness.
In our new open-access study, Murray Scown and I identified rural regions in Europe that contribute positively to sustainability goals (“brightspots”), and those hindering progress (“dragspots”).
We used hotspot analysis of 24 social and environmental indicators, drawn from the overlap of the EU Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)— the EU’s €59 billion farm subsidy program and largest budget item.
Here’s what we found:
1. The EU pays a high price to support unsustainable land systems.
Dragspots, regions with poor social and environmental outcomes, often receive high subsidy support. This means public money is paying for “bads” like social inequities and environmental harm.
Some good news: environmental subsidies do work. High-performing environmental regions benefitted from this targeted support.
2. Tradeoff between food production and sustainable outcomes :(
The least sustainable regions were doing one thing right: producing a high fraction of food for people. This highlights a major tradeoff in European agriculture: high food production currently comes at high environmental cost. We can do better.
Globally, only 55% of food directly feeds people; the rest is used inefficiently for animal feed (36%) or biofuels and industry (9%).
3. Brightspots: Nordics and Central Europe
Two brightspot regions stood out for their contributions to social and environmental sustainability goals: the Nordics (Sweden + Finland) and Central Europe (Germany, Austria, eastern Switzerland). These areas benefit from less intensive farming practices, including organic agriculture, low energy use in farming, supported by robust agricultural training, providing high farm employment and income.
We found five dragspots where rural land use is hindering progress towards the SDGs: the Lowlands, Northern Italy, Southern Italy and Malta, Southern Spain, and the Balkans. Dragspots were characterized by intensive agriculture with high inputs of irrigation, pesticides and fertilizers, as well as very large, industrial animal agriculture such as in the Lowlands and Northern Italy.
The path forward
Our research suggests the following steps to transition to sustainable food systems:
Measure sustainability using social and environmental outcomes tied to policy goals.
Shift subsidies to reward positive social and environmental outcomes.
Support low-input, sustainable farming for its multiple benefits.
Explore case studies where generous food production is balanced with good sustainability outcomes.
Read the study here, if you like.
Feelings: Resolute
I’ve been feeling… kind of a lack of feeling… about some pretty monumental events this fall: the American elections, the United Nations conferences on climate and biodiversity. These are important moments, things are not going great, and yet my response is… meh? 🤷♀️
Right now, I don’t feel panic or despair. I know climate work is still needed and it still matters. This will continue to be true for the rest of my life.
In what I hope is being resolute and clear-eyed and constructive, but may also be tinged with cynicism, I increasingly accept in my bones that no one is coming to save us. As I wrote in Under the Sky We Make,
We as humanity, a groundswell of people alive today around the world, have to save ourselves, through what we think and feel and ultimately what we do. This means we need people with the courage and compassion and imagination to transform themselves, and society, in the ways that science tells us are necessary to maintain conditions for life on Earth to be able to thrive. Each of us can become that sort of person; more and more are every day.
Real leadership - climate and otherwise- may not emerge from the top. In the past, I’ve felt shattered by global circumstances going in the wrong direction. Right now, I just feel resolute to keep doing what I can, where I can. Thanks for being on Team Climate.
Action: Reassess Social Media
Ah, social media, that double-edged sword.
On the positive side, social media can shape cultural norms and help set policy agendas, including for climate action. But social media can also spread climate misinformation (unintentionally incorrect) or disinformation (deliberately misleading), contribute to increasing polarization, and disproportionately amplify negative messages.
As a very active user of social media professionally, I’ve gained valuable connections, ideas, and community. But over the last couple of years, especially now that Climate Twitter has become, as Katharine Hayhoe told Science last week, a “ghost town,” I’ve been reconsidering how and when I use social media.
Instead of hot takes, I crave deeper, slower, more thoughtful and nuanced analysis and reflection. Reading more longform journalism and books, and spending more time in the real world (connecting with people, going for walks, paying attention while cooking) feels better for me right now.
I want to save the precious, limited bandwidth of my mind and attention for what matters and where I can make a contribution. Five years later, I’m still haunted by the hour-long yoga class I ruined by ruminating over a comment from A Stranger on the Internet Who Was Wrong.
I’m also increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of donating my unpaid labor - writing original material, as well as clicking on platforms - to further enrich billionaires with dubious motives.
My evolving strategy is to spend more time writing original longer “content” (cringe) here on Substack, sharing excerpts on social platforms, and slowly keep working on a new book.
I appreciate that you, dear reader, have chosen to join We Can Fix It and to share your email with me, so we can stay connected regardless of what happens to these platforms. So thanks for being here. <3
For your climate action this month, I encourage you to consider your relationship with social media.
Some options to consider, to whatever extent works for you right now:
Remove social media apps from your phone.
Try a social media fast (a week? a month?).
Set time limits for apps using tools like Screen Time for iPhone or Digital Wellbeing for Android.
Follow those who spark your curiosity and energy. Block those who don’t.
Choose when and how you engage, and the kinds of conversations you want to contribute to.
Charge your phone outside your bedroom to avoid late-night distractions. (This has helped me sleep better and double the number of books I read!)
What will you do with the time and energy you free up? That’s up to you! A few suggestions:
Take high-impact climate action with the Choose Your Own Climate Adventure Guide.
Enjoy time in nearby nature, and take care of your local patch.
Find your climate peeps — people you have fun with, including while talking about and taking climate action.
Join and support local climate action groups- here’s how to get started.
Read more books and in-depth journalism, like my recommended climate media.
Parting Tidbits
Upcoming talks:
Join in person or online on December 12 for a seminar and workshop on sustainable agriculture in a changing climate, hosted by Université Laval in Quebec City.
Book Recommendation
Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, by Ingrid Robeyns. I really enjoyed reading this clearly argued book, making the philosophical case for setting an upper limit on wealth for the sake of people and climate. Definitely a thought-provoking holiday gift!
Take care friends, have safe and peaceful holidays. I’ll be back here in January, look forward to seeing you then!
xo,
Kim
P.S. I met my goal of 1,000 hours outside for 2024! Actually I’m ahead of schedule, I’m now at 1,125 and counting! I really enjoyed finding more ways to be outside, and hope to continue. Highly recommend for 2025!
Really loved the photo of the bison. I see myself joining you there on the snowy road as another bison, taking one resolute step in front of the other.
I can truly recommend the One Sec app (https://one-sec.app). It helped me reduce my social media time a lot, and now I barely use them. It works by having you wait a short while (standard setting is 10 s) to open the app. I am truly surprised at how effective that 10 second wait is – though for Facebook I ended up having to set it to a whopping 40 seconds :-). Of course, for people who feel they can just remove social media apps, this is not needed.