Benoit Dillet and Sophia Hatzisavvidou examine the role that climate data plays in overlooking and depoliticising lived experiences of climate anxiety.
Amidst climate disasters, devastating wars, paralysing pandemics, and increasing socio-economic inequalities, a persistent line of critique rejects the idea that these events denote anything more than isolated occurrences of human history and experience. Celebrating the human capacity for reasoning and innovation as key markers of modernity and rejecting any questioning of ‘progress’ as alarmism, this line of critique is represented in the body of work that Alf Hornborg (2019) identifies as the ‘new optimists’, i.e. authors such as Steven Pinker, Johan Norberg and Hans Rosling. As Hornborg (2019, 41) argues, the problem with this uncritical embrace of (a particular account of) progress is that it readily justifies unequal development, work exploitation and extractivism, as long as relative poverty is falling and literacy and life expectations are increasing. But there is a second issue with the unproblematic embrace of ‘progress’ measured in seemingly objective data and statistics: data is not neutral or value-free. In this short blog, we examine how the politics of climate data has consequences for mental health (climate anxiety and shame) and climate data communication is a relevant point of relay.
Situating Climate Data
Data-based optimism can depoliticise climate change and create a sense of comfort and even satisfaction with ‘progress’. This is the spirit of Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World (2024), which uses data to explain why we can be optimistic about the main environmental problems we face. Considering the increased attention that climate change received after 2019 with the intensification of the climate movement (XR, Fridays for Future), policy responses (Net Zero), and media coverage of the topic, Ritchie’s book actively seeks to counter doom and gloom by bringing to the fore the good news about the positive impacts that recent human action against climate change has had. The big headlines can be summarised in a few soundbites: Carbon emissions per capita are going down! Natural disasters are more frequent but kill a lot fewer people than they did decades ago! Many endangered species have been saved! The corollary is ‘your everyday stress about recycling, veganism, organic food, local consumption is misplaced and too overwhelming’. The Oxford-based climate data scientist wants to change the narrative and look beyond the catastrophist headlines to produce a different, more positive story emerging from climate data. The current situation is much better than newsreaders might think. If only people knew the data, then a different fight against climate change would emerge, Ritchie proposes.
In the medical-environmental humanities as well as within environmental discourse more generally, there has been a recent turn to emotions, and particularly to climate anxiety (e.g. Pikhala 2020). Ritchie seeks to respond to this shift by highlighting the good news and presenting statistics that help ground individuals’ behaviour on scientific accounts. The issue with the book is not the veracity of the data; the work is useful, much like the broader work of Our World in Data, on which Ritchie bases her analysis. Rather, the issue lies with the interpretation of this data, as well as with a broader attitude towards what data is and does. This question is not simply a matter of theoretical concern: it actively shapes the kinds of decisions deemed relevant, appropriate, and fair. The statement that ‘things are better’ begs the question: ‘better for whom?’ as Andrea Cardini points out in a commentary on Hans Rosling’s Factfulness (Cardini 2022, 2). Even though it is indisputable that huge efforts are being made to make societies and economies more sustainable, it is increasingly clear that these efforts are not enough. The pursuit of justice, more broadly, and climate justice, more concretely, will always be an ongoing process, and it is not a matter of being optimistic or pessimistic, but of finding new frameworks and new techno-social relations moving forward. The Anthropocene is as much a new health reality as it is a new geological reality, and we cannot dissociate the two.
Drawing on decades of scientific research, it is crucial to recognise that climate change data (like all data) is always situated and embodied: it does not tell the entire story, and it certainly does not tell an objective one. Two assumptions that underlie Ritchie’s work:
- Data is superior to other forms of knowledge. However, one of the main repeated outcomes of international summits on climate change is the need for Western states to be humbler and make more space for other, non-Western, forms of knowledge and practice that have been neglected for too long.
- Data-centrism offers a clear view of the world. However, data does not exhaust the empirical observation of the world. Social sciences focus on the role of subjectivity and perception in constructing social facts. For instance, the French sociologists Nicolas Duvoux and Adrien Papuchon have shown the discrepancies between those who are objectively considered poor by national statistics data and those who consider themselves poor and socially insecure due to a ‘degraded attitude towards their own future’ (Duvoux and Papuchon 2019, 4). Poverty is not just defined in monetary terms but also in opportunities and self-reflections. Some communities in India or China might be better off than 20 or 30 years ago, but this does not mean that we can claim their lives are qualitatively better without asking them. Additionally, this statement does not mean to idealise poverty or agrarian life. Like in the case of poverty (on which Ritchie often follows a framework developed by Hans Rosling et al (2018), in the case of sustainability or the ecological transition, data is not everything; people’s relation to the future and to their own work ought to be accounted for.
Data cannot speak for itself since we do not live in value-free societies. Decisions about the environment, nature and the climate are always already political and cannot be dismissed or unaccounted for. There is a glaring absence in the book: a discussion of how the politics of science ought to be communicated. Turning democracy into a technocracy leaves the people out of the equation. As Leonora King and Marc Tadaki (2018, 68) note, scientists make choices ‘beyond their scientific intent’ and these choices have ‘societal and environmental consequences’.
Transition Imaginaries
The unproblematic embrace of data as a panacea for addressing climate change leads to the rejection of climate anxiety as simply misplaced. But as we argue in our recent book Transition Imaginaries, there will be no just transition without addressing the current health consequences of the changing climate: the epidemic of climate anxiety and the sad affects associated with it (Dillet and Hatzisavvidou 2026, 39-51). Turning to Spinoza’s definition of joy, as the affect that increases our power to act, we make the hypothesis that the climate movement will not move forward if it does not develop strategies to focus on joyful affects. In a sense, Our World in Data and Not the End of the World attempts to produce joyful affects for the elites that drive technosolutionism. Buy an electric car or avoid the car altogether, and the rest is business-as-usual. On the contrary, in our book we argue that the global climate crisis opens a ‘new regime of historicity’ (how societies understand and relate to temporality) that reconfigures the past, the present and the future in meaningful ways. People might not know the right statistics, but they can sense and feel the opening of this new regime.
In Transition Imaginaries, we argue that adopting a different perspective on technology, one that goes beyond the strict focus on data, innovation and technoscience, opens new avenues out of our current climate emergency. Techno-optimism is not a marginalised discourse: it is elite discourse, and it is atmospheric and ambient. Furthering Lewis and Maslin’s axiom (2018: 73) ‘geology plus humans equals politics’, we call into attention the political dimension of climate change. Politics is based on irremediable conflict as well as solidarity and care. The point is to acknowledge the different forms of dissensus rather than ignore conflict or expose its false beliefs (Machin 2023).
The elite discourse of data-driven optimism has a stark depoliticising effect: it seeks to relax the body politic about pressing issues. Ritchie’s book is symptomatic of this, starting with the title and the recurring section ‘things to stress less about’ in each chapter, acting as a self-help guide. The book is a moral relaxant; climate change is not as threatening, as many solutions are on the way to make it much less threatening. Not the End of the World is a self-help book in which the only agents of change are consumers rather than workers, citizens, communities or even governments.
Unless read against political accounts of climate change, there is a danger that readers will understand Ritchie’s story as being the full story. This obscures the fact that in the margins of the data lie the lives of millions, if not billions, who suffer and try, in their own makeshift way, to adapt to the new ecological realities of the 21st century. Pollution and toxicity are both relevant here. Ritchie argues that pollution is, in fact, much more significant than the abstract idea that the world is ending or that climate change will happen overnight. But in Delhi, India, toxicity has become a way of life; the hyper-economisation and the forgetting of non-economic values (such as clean air or nature) have led to the creation of a ‘toxcene’ (Mathur 2022; Dillet 2026). Similarly to the previous point about the lived experience of statistics, things can be improving in data, but the shifting experience, even if it is subjective and misleading, can be more real than seeing the world through data.
About the author
Sophia Hatzisavvidou is a Reader in Politics at the University of Bath (UK). She is the author of Transition Imaginaries (with. B. Dillet) (2026), Appearances of Ethos in Political Thought (2016) and has published in Contemporary Political Theory, Political Studies, and Environmental Politics. Her work focuses on ecopolitical imaginaries, just transitions, and sustainable futures.
Benoit Dillet is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bath (UK). He is the author of Transition Imaginaries (with S. Hatzisavvidou) (2026), The Political Space of Art (with T. Puri) (2016) and the translator of Bernard Stiegler’s Philosophising by Accident (2017). His work focuses on political theory of technology, affect theory and future climate imaginaries.
References
Cardini, Andrea. 2022. “Rosling’s Fallacy: Conservation, Biodiversity and the Anthropocentrism of Hans Rosling’s Factfulness.” The Ecological Citizen 5(2): 1–6.
Dillet, Benoit, and Sophia Hatzisavvidou. 2026. Transition Imaginaries: Contested Temporalities, Affective Politics, and Decolonial Technology. Cambridge University Press.
Dillet, Benoit. 2026. “The Shame of the World in Ordinary Climate Politics.” Environmental Politics 35 (1): 11–30.
Hornborg, Alf. 2019. Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene: Unraveling the Money‑Energy‑Technology Complex. Cambridge University Press.
King, Leila, and Marc Tadaki. 2018. “A Framework for Understanding the Politics of Science (Core Tenet #2).” In Handbook of Critical Physical Geography, edited by Rebecca Lave et al., 67–88. Palgrave Macmillan.
Mathur, Dinesh. 2022. Available to Be Poisoned: Toxicity as a Form of Life. Lexington Books.
Pihkala, P. 2020. Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety. Sustainability, 12(19), 7836.
Ritchie, Hannah. 2024. Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, Vintage.
Rosling, Hans, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Rönnlund. 2018. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Flatiron Books.
