International Reducing CO2 Emissions Day – 28th January 2025

Professor Ian J. Bateman, Land, Environment, Economics and Policy Institute (LEEP), Department of Economics, University of Exeter Business School

The Focussing Illusion and Decision Making

Focussing on a problem is a good idea – right? Well not when that focus makes you blind to everything else.

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman coined the term ‘Focussing Illusion’ to describe this problem, highlighting it with the Chinese proverb that ‘Nothing is as important as when you think about it’. None of us are immune to this – we think about something and everything else fades away. Unfortunately this tendency seems reflected in the decisions we make – including those with massive side effects. So continued reliance on fossil fuels seems a great idea when we just focus on all the benefits it gives us and ignore all the wider effects this has on the planet.

A Focussed Approach to Tree Planting

Clearly the Focussing Illusion can be a real problem in decision making – even when we are focussing on something as apparently uncontroversially good as removing greenhouses gases from the atmosphere by planting trees.

Focussing just on those trees we can consider a host of directly related issues:

  • which species of trees should we plant?
  • How fast will they remove carbon from the atmosphere?
  • How will they change the carbon in soils?
  • What happens to that carbon when trees  are cut down?
  • How fast does carbon get released back to the atmosphere if you use the trees for making paper or building houses?

Is this all we need to consider?

These are all important questions and need to be considered when making decisions about using trees to help address climate change. But they are not the full set of questions that need to be answered. There are a wider set of questions concerning the secondary or knock-on effects of planting.

For example, if tree planting displaces farming then where will the food concerned now come from and what will be the effects of shifting that production? If planting trees in Lincolnshire results in food production shifting to the Amazon (perfectly possible in the highly connected world we live in) then how many Brazilian trees will be felled for each one planted in the UK and what will be carbon and wider effects of that?

It’s not all negatives though – planting trees can provide habitat for our endangered wild species, or reduce the chances of downstream flooding.

A Systems Analysis

Generally then, changing land use has multiple effects, because the natural environment comprises multiple connections, typically referred to as a system. Problems arise when our decision making focus results in us considering just parts of that system rather than it all. And these problems can be very big – indeed it’s not an exaggeration to say that almost every environmental problem we face arises because our decisions focus on just parts of a system rather than its whole. This means that when we undertake a ‘focussed analysis’ we ignore many of the systems effects which a decision will cause – in short we make decisions without knowing their consequences. Figure 1 provides a visual contrast between a ‘focussed’ and ‘systems’ analysis illustrating the major differences between the two.

Figure 1: Contrasting a ‘focused’ and ‘systems’ analysis

Addressing Climate Change with a Systems Approach

Now all of the above does not at all imply that we should not be doing anything about climate change. In fact when you take a systems approach to looking at the global economic and social impacts which climate change is already triggering – and then consider what is to come – then this is one of the most important and urgent challenges facing humanity. But that doesn’t mean that we should ignore everything else when deciding which is the best approach to addressing climate change.

Creating a Land Use Change Decision Support System

The research undertaken in NetZeroPlus, ADD-TREES and VOCul attempts to bring all aspects of a system into a decision. This is done by linking together information and knowledge about all aspects of the environmental system so that, for example, when we plant trees we don’t just look at the consequences for timber production and carbon storage but also consider effects upon food production, wild species and biodiversity, water quality and flooding, farmers’ incomes, recreation and other system effects. Furthermore this is achieved by the application of advanced AI research linking that information together in ways which presents it to decision makers in an easily accessible form where they can see the full effects of changing decisions, such as planting in different areas or at different times.

 

The right place for the right tree

Our recent research shows that taking a systems effect shows that trees should be a very important part of our response to climate change – but that finding the right place for the right tree is vital [1]. These include papers looking at land use changes and their wider impacts [2] including: food production [3] and food prices [4], carbon storage [5], wild species and biodiversity [6,7,8,9], water quality [10]. Effects are considered both here in the UK and in terms of their impacts on the environment and economy elsewhere [11] and under uncertain climate change futures [12]. All of these papers are available through the website links shown below or via the University of Exeter Repository.

Exeter University Repository

References

  1. Bateman, I.J., Binner, A., Addicott, E., Balmford, B., Cho, F.H.T., Daily, G.C., De-Gol, A., Faccioli, M., Ferguson-Gow, H., Fezzi, C., Ferrini, S., Gannon, K., Groom, B. Harwood, A., Hillier, J., Hulme, M.F., Lee, C.F., Liuzzo, L., Lovett, A., Mancini, M.C., Matthews, R., Morison, J.I.L., Owen, N., Pearson, R., Polasky, S., Siriwardena, G., Smith, P., Snowdon, P., Tippett, P., Vetter, S., Vinjili, S. Vossler, C.A., Watson, R.T., Williamson, D. and Day, B.H. (2024) How to make land use policy decisions: Integrating science and economics to deliver connected climate, biodiversity and food objectives, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 121 (49) e2407961121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2407961121
  2. Bateman, I.J., Anderson, K., Argles, A., Belcher, C., Betts, R.A., Binner, A., Brazier, R., Cho, F.H.T., Collins, R.M., Day, B.H., Duran-Rojas, C., Eisenbarth, S., Gannon, K., Gatis, N., Groom, B., Hails, R., Harper, A., Harwood, A., Hastings, A., Heard, M.S, Hill, T., Inman, A., Lee, C.F., Luscombe, D., Mackenzie, A.R., Mancini, M., Morison, J.I.L., Morris, A., Quine, C.P., Snowdon, P., Tyler, C.R., Vanguelova, E.I., Wilkinson, M., Williamson, D., Xenakis, G. (2023) A review of planting principles to identify the right place for the right tree for ‘net zero plus’ woodlands: Applying a place-based natural capital framework for Sustainable, Efficient and Equitable (SEE) decisions, People and Nature, 5:271–301, DOI: 10.1002/pan3.10331
  3. Day, B., Mancini, M., Bateman, I.J., Binner, A., Cho, F., de Gol, A., Ferguson-Gow, H., Fezzi, C., Lee, C., Liuzzo, L., Lovett, A., Owen, N., Pearson, R., Smith, G. (2024) Natural capital approaches for the optimal design of policies for nature recovery,   Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 379: 20220327, pp12,  https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0327
  4. Faccioli, M., Tingley, D.M., Mancini, M.C. and Bateman, I.J. (2024) Who should benefit from environmental policies? Social preferences and nonmarket values for the distribution of environmental improvements, Special Issue on the Economics of Inequity in Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Systems, American Journal of Agriculture Economics, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12467
  5. Argles, A., Robertson, E., Harper, A., Morison, J., Xenakis, G., Hastings, A., McCalmont, J., Moore, J., Bateman, I.J., Gannon, K., Betts, R., Bathgate, S., Thomas, J., Heard, M. and Cox, P. (2023) Modelling the impact of forest management and CO2‑fertilisation on growth and demography in a Sitka spruce plantation, Forest Carbon Special Issue, Scientific Reports, 13:13487, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-39810-2
  6. Binner, A.R., Addicott, E.T., Balmford, B., Day, B.H., Mancini, M.C., Williamson, D. and Bateman, I.J. (2025) Using the natural capital framework to integrate biodiversity into sustainable, efficient and equitable environmental-economic decision making, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 380: 20230215, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0215
  7. Balmford, A., Bateman, I.J., Eyres, A., Swinfield, T. and Ball, T.S. (2025) Sustainable high-yield farming is essential for bending the curve of biodiversity loss, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 380: 20230216, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0216
  8. Mancini, M.C., Collins, R.M., Addicott, E.T., Balmford, B.J., Binner, A., Bull, J.W., Day, B.H., Eigenbrod, F., zu Ermgassen, S.O.S.E., Faccioli, M., Fezzi, C., Groom, B., Milner-Gulland, E.J., Owen, N., Tingley, D., Wright, E., Bateman, I.J. (2024) Biodiversity offsets perform poorly for both people and nature, but better approaches are available, One Earth, 7, 2165–2174, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2024.10.002
  9. Bateman, I.J. and Balmford, A. (2023) Current conservation policies risk accelerating biodiversity loss, Nature, 618: 671- 674, 22nd June 2023,  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01979-x
  10. Bateman, I.J., Keeler, B., Olmstead, S.M. and Whitehead, J. (2023) Perspectives on valuing water quality improvements using stated preference methods, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 120 (18): e2217456120, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2217456120
  11. Balmford, A. Ball, T.S., Balmford, B., Bateman, I.J., Buchanan, G., Cerullo, G.R., d’Albertas, F., Eyres, A., Filewod, B., Fisher, B., Green, J.H.M., Hemes, K.S., Holland, J., Lam, M.S., Naidoo, R., Pfaff, A., Ricketts, T., Sanderson, F., Searchinger, T.D., Strassburg, B.B.N., Swinfield, T., Williams, D.R. (2025) It’s time to fix the biodiversity leak: The risk that locally successful nature conservation may be shifting problems elsewhere can no longer be ignored, Science, 10.1126/science.adv8264, accepted 16th January 2025.
  12. Cho, F.H.T., Aglonucci, P., Bateman, I.J., Lovett, A.A., Mancini, M.C., Rapti, C. and Day, B.H., Tree planting still part of an optimal decarbonisation strategy despite persistent risks, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), accepted 14th January 2024.