The perception of socio-environmental risks and their impact. By Alexandra Farbiarz Mas

I've been working in environmental communications for many years. For more than 20 years, not a single day has gone by that I haven't stopped being amazed by the widespread indifference or the need to ignore these risks, which for many have ceased to be risks and have become a reality. Now we all have, to a greater or lesser extent, experienced the socio-environmental risks and the impacts that we humans have generated on the environment and continue to carry out.

Risks or impacts?

In reality, we don't live in a situation of environmental risks, but rather of impacts that manifest themselves either silently, such as the various forms of pollution we experience, or through so-called environmental disasters that can occur over a more or less prolonged period. In the latter case, we would be talking about phenomena such as drought or the decline of forest trees.

Thus, even though we speak of risks, the term may be misleading, although the expression "risk perception" is appropriate to the extent that it is still perceived as such. Otherwise, we would have already taken several precautions when many scientists, as well as observation and common sense, tell us that we have ample room for improvement, taking into account all the evidence, data, and experiences we have around the world in this regard. We would therefore be moving away from the term "risk" and toward another, yet-to-be-defined concept.

Some might say it's because it's beyond the individual. And that's true, but this doesn't mean that as individuals we can't do anything. In fact, you could say I've just made a generalization. And yes, it is because there are actually many people who, alone or in company, do great work to contribute their bit to a change desired by many others but who can't always dedicate their time to it, or others who do perceive that things need to change but don't know how to distinguish the information they receive or feel overwhelmed by other priorities that life demands of them.

Difficulties in socio-environmental communication

In an article I wrote in 2021, entitled “ The Necessary Explanatory Narrative of Environmental Communication ,” I pointed out some of the difficulties of environmental communication, which I now expand upon:

• We live in cities, very disconnected from nature and its life cycles, which we often don't know how to interpret. Therefore, it's not easy to accept how rapidly our environment is changing and how it affects us.
• In the age of distraction and entertainment in the digital society, ambient communication competes with many other messages that do not necessarily make it attractive to the general public.
• In contrast, the messages and vocabulary of sustainability are more complex, which doesn't help with accessibility in an era where, in addition to entertainment, we have to deal with an excess of "information" and fakes .
• At the same time, this digital fatigue and/or addictions, and the comparative patterns we can no longer imagine living without, are generating increasingly more mental health problems, as well as having a critical impact that neuroscientists are alarmed to note is in serious danger. Michel Dusmerget in France and psychologist Francisco Villar in Spain are very clear about this and other consequences of mobile use and abuse.
• But, in addition, in the digital world, the concept of "community" has been shattered. Previously, community was the physical and relational environment in which you lived. Now, "digital communities" are exclusively communities of shared interests. This creates a juxtaposition of communities that are deaf to each other. Algorithms don't allow you to see any point of view other than your own, unless there are companies or governments that can afford to pay for large campaigns to make their own discourse prevail. This leads us to the impossibility of generating a shared digital culture of sustainability, no matter how much access we have, those who are not sensitive to the issue will not reach those posts or reels where they can learn.
• As Meritxell Martell and Ana Romero point out in their article, “ Crisis, emergency, or catastrophe? The power of terminology in climate risk communication,” the use of words and what arouses us emotionally determines our actions. Therefore, we must try to find communication formulas that are as relatable as they are rigorous and, at the same time, that inspire us to take action. But sometimes, in the media, ultra-dramatic effects, even if they attract the most attention, do not necessarily lead us to action. The article offers some proposals for writing and available environmental communication tools.

However, there are other risks that open even wider gaps and blur the socio-environmental and economic risks we are already experiencing.

Denialism

• The evident advance of denialism, which is based on short, simplistic messages that are much easier to "read" than scientific messages, which require a much more complex understanding of reality.
• Denialism has called science into question because science, in turn, challenges certain beliefs of the market economy. On the other hand, denialism has embraced freedom as its own brand to establish itself as a protectionist of science. This association calls into question even the foundations of democracy. Science historian Naomie Oreskes of Harvard University explains this well in this video from the Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona .

Resource finiteness versus linear economy

• The lack of awareness or acceptance by the economies of wealthy and emerging countries of the resources needed for the production of goods and the rapidly advancing digital development will lead to a shortage of these resources that will severely impact our lives.
• This last point leads us to a lack of short-, medium-, and long-term perspective among many "business as usual" business models, which still don't understand that controlling their costs through a thorough analysis of the value chain could help them achieve an ecological transition that truly allows them to be sustainable over time. Because, whether they like it or not, even if they control many resources, they don't exactly grow.
• Techno-optimism as a solution to all our environmental ills when we need more time for these solutions to mature in order to evaluate whether they are reasonable or not, and to weigh whether the ecological backpack they entail is worthwhile in terms of the final balance of their implementation. SMART can cost us much more than we imagine, not only on an environmental level, but also with respect to the solidity of democratic principles, as Tunisian-French political scientist Asma Mhalla points out. However, we now deify digitalization despite the problems we already know it entails and which are aggravated by the development of AI. In this sense, the studies by Pablo Gámez Cersosimo are very interesting.
• The lack of legal and financial support for the development of alternatives that are already known to be necessary to address our socio-environmental challenges. For example, the lack of tools to develop waste prevention and recover as many materials as possible for reuse or to place them in the secondary materials market rather than consider recycling, thereby respecting the waste hierarchy.

Risks and economic consequences of “environmental” disasters

Being very ethnocentric but perhaps because it directly affects us we can understand better, at the end of last year the European Environment Agency told us the following: “Extreme weather and climate events caused an estimated economic losses of €738 billion between 1980 and 2023 in the European Union, of which more than €162 billion (22%) occurred between 2021 and 2023. ”

What is clear is that extreme events, no matter how risky they are, are occurring with increasing speed, and therefore their economic cost will increase even more. Moreover, it happens overnight. Valencia knows this well: the estimated economic costs in December 2024 amounted to €22 billion . But how do you calculate the cost of 222 souls and the cost of job losses for many more, as well as the reconstruction by individuals?

Conclusions

There are risks to people's safety that we all understand as such, for example, the feeling of safety when walking down the street. For a woman, the risk will be understood one way and for men another, even though we may all run it for obvious reasons, which I won't go into here.

However, the risk of the climate crisis, food sovereignty, or drought is felt when a catastrophe has occurred or the situation is so serious that we begin to feel the consequences. Here, the notions of foresight, prudence, precaution, and prevention are not applied in the same way, just as a few years ago, the measures regarding the need to develop measures to make women feel safer on the streets, especially at night, were not applied.

It was something that was understood as beyond individuals, as is also the case with socio-environmental issues. However, culturally, something has changed, and what was once experienced individually is now known socially. This sums up the great challenge of the coming years to be able to transcend conversations between those affected and experts and make the leap to society at large.

Thus, the lack of application of the principles of prevention and precaution is related to how a shared or unshared perception of risks is socially constructed.

Even so, we have some reason for hope. For example, a study from this year entitled " Water in Spain: Opinions, Attitudes, and Priorities of Citizens " suggests that "In the event of a possible drought, agriculture is the priority sector for Spaniards to allocate water to, once the population is supplied." In this sense, it seems that, although the risk of questioning food sovereignty is not necessarily known, it is perceived in other forms. This also provides us with a kind of fertile ground to work on regarding the perception of risk in its political and social application, which is to seek formulas to reach a consensus on the priorities to establish in the face of socio-environmental risks, taking into account shared experiences as well as available studies and/or knowledge.

Finally, environmental risks are not isolated from many other activities and social trends, which may explain why we tend to look the other way when faced with the difficulty of addressing the issue because it is too complex and multifaceted. What we do in our daily lives, such as the rush we take or the use of our cell phones, for example, also affects the perception of these "risks." We are left with the consolation of the concern expressed by citizens about the dangers they perceive regarding the environment . To overcome this despair, we need a great deal of education, but also the visibility of alternatives that work and reverse the effects of climate change, because they exist, and many more than we think, and at different scales. We also need to strengthen and undertake community, business, and some administrative initiatives to push toward sustainability and push government officials to establish political priorities to bring them to a level that generates greater resilience, not more fragility, in our environment in the face of socio-environmental risks and realities.