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 invisible.
In many people’s conversations, record heat or flooding are still described as odd weather rather than recognised as signs of a shifting climate that affects food prices and public health. Companies announce net-zero plans yet expand activities that embed new emissions.
Meanwhile, governments hand responsibility to environment ministries even though the main drivers sit in finance or security. We need to see much more clearly.
Read more: To address the environmental polycrisis, the first step is to demand more honesty
The past ten years have been the hottest on record. The Amazon, host of this year’s UN climate summit, is experiencing droughts so severe that they disrupt river transport and rainfall patterns across the Americas. These developments are not isolated. They reflect mounting pressure on the Earth system.
Modern societies also forget that their prosperity rests on a simple physical process: burning things. Contemporary civilisation has been built around combustion, from coal and oil to natural gas that run homes and industries.
This has turned humanity into a planetary force of disruption, reshaping the atmosphere, the oceans and the ecosystems on which all life depends.
Yet ecological myopia makes it difficult for governments and institutions to respond with the urgency required. When climate is treated as a sector, action is funnelled into narrow channels such as emissions targets or carbon markets, while the deeper forces reshaping the planet continue largely unchecked. Land use, fossil-fuel infrastructure and global supply chains remain the structural drivers of destabilisation.
A planetary lens
A cure for ecological myopia requires using the planetary lens that political geoecology offers. It starts from a simple premise: Everything people depend on, including energy, water, food and health, is embedded in the Earth system.
Looking through this lens shifts priorities. Climate policy becomes inseparable from economic and social policy. Emissions targets are linked to land use and infrastructure, and what societies produce and build.
Indigenous and local knowledge systems are recognised as essential sources of resilience. Protecting ecosystems such as the Amazon is understood as protecting the processes that sustain rainfall and regional stability.
This perspective echoes ideas in research and policy circles on planetary governance, which is not simply global governance at a larger scale. It focuses on how societies can govern within ecological limits and in response to feedbacks – the knock-on effects the Earth system sends back as conditions change – rather than managing climate as an external problem.
For example, shrinking river flows that threaten hydropower or severe flooding that disrupts food production and transport show how Earth system changes spill across sectors, not just climate policy.
Seeing more clearly is the first step toward wiser action.
The central challenge is not only to cut emissions. It is to rethink how societies understand and organise their relationship with the living Earth and to overcome ecological myopia in media narratives, institutional design and economic choices.
The Amazon is often described as the lungs of the planet. It is also a mirror that shows how closely human life is bound into the wider Earth system and how vulnerable that system has become. Now, it’s time to use this mirror to tackle our ecological myopia.
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Prior to retirement Simon Dalby was funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Tom Pegram does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.