Chimpanzee Politics and Climate Change
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Bibliographic details
- Authors: RUCHIR AGARWAL
- Published: September 2, 2021
Overview and framing
- Author: RUCHIR AGARWAL
- Publication: F&D Magazine, September 2021
- Core argument: Lessons from animal cooperation (especially among chimpanzees and other species) can inform the design of economic and financial institutions that help overcome human limits to cooperation and improve global responses to climate change, pandemics, and nuclear threats.
- Biological premise: Humans share 98 percent of their genes with chimpanzees; the remaining 2 percent contributes to distinctive human capacities and risks.
Evolutionary basis for cooperation
- Cooperative behavior favored when actor and receiver survival benefits are positively correlated; two main channels:
- Kinship (shared genes by common descent).
- Reciprocity (current costs offset by expected future benefits).
- Empirical patterns highlighted:
- Cooperation in animal societies most frequently involves kin (example: cheetah siblings hunting together).
- Nonkin cooperation often occurs when immediate mutual benefits exist (examples: chimpanzee grooming, remoras and sea turtles).
- Cognitive constraints:
- Many nonhuman species face cognitive limits to maintaining reciprocity.
- Humans have evolved cognitive capacity for long intertemporal trades and reciprocal exchanges involving long delays and cheating risks — described as “intertemporal trade” in economics.
Barriers to global cooperation on climate change
- Four factors hindering cooperation for climate mitigation (as described in the source):
- Presence of multiple nonkin actors on a truly global scale (including between countries at opposite poles and between current and future generations).
- Long time lags between cooperative acts make reciprocity hard to imagine.
- Geographic inequality lowers mutual benefits from cooperation.
- Evolutionary limits to imagination and comprehension of diverse belief systems and the extent of the climate threat.
Institutional responses: seven insights for designing economic and financial institutions
- The source identifies seven insights from evolutionary biology to inform institutional design; the first four pertain to mitigation, the next two to adaptation, and the last to monitoring.
- Mitigation (insights 1–4):
- Greater global integration of economic and financial markets:
- Rationale: Economic interdependence reduces conflict and fosters cooperation; trading alliances create incentives to keep peace and protect partners to avoid disruption of trade.
- Historical quote: Montesquieu, 1748: “The natural effect of commerce is to bring peace. Two nations that negotiate between themselves become reciprocally dependent.”
- Accountability and decentralization:
- Problem: Incentives to cheat are strong when punishment for noncooperative behavior is weak and international enforcement is limited.
- Proposal: Strengthen international rule of law and decentralize by encouraging subnational governments and corporations to make climate and environmental pledges, leveraging local accountability and stakeholder pressure.
- Weight future generations explicitly:
- Observation: Nonhuman animals discount future rewards much more than humans; humans who lack understanding may heavily discount the future.
- Proposal: Place weight explicitly on utility for future generations in every cost-benefit analysis underpinning government, corporate, and private actions; encourage greater political representation of younger people and build policy institutions focusing on long-term issues such as intergenerational inequality (that lasts beyond the electoral cycle).
- Example: Several countries, such as Bhutan, already incorporate such approaches in policy frameworks.
- Accelerate clean energy innovation to align private incentives:
- Rationale: Innovation cooperation (as seen during COVID-19 vaccine development) can be scaled quickly; reducing costs of renewables has driven recent clean energy shifts.
- Policy implication: If political cooperation on measures like carbon taxes is difficult, make it easier for self-regarding actors to choose climate-friendly options by accelerating clean energy innovation to increase private benefits of switching.
- Adaptation (insights 5–6):
- Centralized global market to hedge climate risks:
- Analogy: Food sharing among chimpanzees works for idiosyncratic risks; insurance markets hedge idiosyncratic human risks.
- Problem: Correlated (aggregate) climate risks require a global market; a single global platform maximizes coincidence of needs and brings together entities with less correlated exposures.
- Objective: Maximize risk sharing and promote cross-country cooperation via a centralized global platform.
- Act before uncertainty about cross-country impacts is resolved:
- Analogy: Vampire bats share food today because uncertainty about survival tomorrow creates incentives to share now.
- Rationale: Markets must act before climate risk materializes; after materialization, the issue shifts from risk sharing to burden sharing, reducing incentives for richer countries to engage with poorer countries likely to suffer more.
- Monitoring (insight 7):
- Invest in information and imagination:
- Problem: Markets and actors will not share or hedge risks if information is limited about those risks.
- Examples:
- India: large populations live where PM2.5 levels—particles smaller than approximately 2.5 microns—are several times higher than the World Health Organization safe level, yet many are unaware due to too few continuous air monitoring stations.
- Socioeconomic feedback loops (for example, potential migration of climate refugees to high-income countries) could reframe localized climate impacts as global problems if better understood.
- Policy implication: Greater environmental disclosures, improved monitoring, and imaginative study of long-term feedback loops can make global climate problems more salient and spur action today.
Key examples and analogies used to support policy insights
- Animal cooperation examples:
- Cheetah brothers hunting together.
- Chimpanzees grooming in Kibale Forest, Uganda.
- Remoras hitching rides on sea turtles.
- Vampire bats regurgitating blood to feed unrelated peers and tracking reciprocity.
- Human cooperation examples:
- Rapid global vaccine innovation during COVID-19 (contrast between fast R&D and slower equitable distribution).
- Decline in renewable energy costs driving adoption absent strong public action.
- Country example: Bhutan weighting future generations in policy frameworks.
- Measurement example:
- PM2.5 particles described as “smaller than approximately 2.5 microns.”
Source: Chimpanzee Politics and Climate Change — Ruchir Agarwal, F&D Magazine, September 2021.
Content in this bundle
- Ruchir Agarwal: The Animal Kingdom and Climate Change – IMF F&D
- سياسات الشمبانزي وتغير المناخ
- La política de los chimpancés y el cambio climático ● Finanzas y Desarrollo ● Septiembre de 2021
- La politique du chimpanzé et le changement climatique
- Политика шимпанзе и изменение климата – Финансы и развитие – Нельзя терять время– сентябрь 2021 года
- 黑猩猩的政治与气候变化 - 金融与发展 - 国际货币基金组织季刊 2021年9月号·第58卷·第3期