
Taking the Future Into Account
Climate policy keeps running into a stubborn feature of human psychology: people discount the future, valuing a smaller reward now over a larger one decades away, even when the delayed reward is a livable planet. This film lays out the research behind that bias and asks what might loosen its grip. It draws on Arianne van der Wal's study "Do natural landscapes reduce future discounting in humans?", which tested whether exposure to nature shifts how people weigh long-term consequences against short-term gain. Researchers and policy analysts walk through why economies and elections reward short-termism by default, and what happens when incentives are restructured to favor patience instead, citing examples of policies elsewhere that have pushed decision-making toward longer time horizons. The film treats climate change as settled science and spends its attention on the behavioral mechanics underneath the problem: why warnings fail to change habits, and which levers, from landscape design to policy design, actually move people to act on threats that are still years or decades away.