World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot
Merz JJ, Barnard P, Rees WE, Smith D, Maroni M, Rhodes CJ, Dederer JH, Bajaj N, Joy MK, Wiedmann T, Sutherland R. Science Progress, 106(3), published online 20 September 2023. DOI: 10.1177/00368504231201372. Open access, CC BY-NC 4.0.
Core claim: anthropogenic Ecological Overshoot is not itself the root problem — it is a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour. The paper names and frames this crisis as the Human Behavioural Crisis. It argues that mainstream overshoot interventions (renewable energy transition, efficiency gains, carbon accounting) target symptoms, are resource-intensive, slow, and address only single co-symptoms (e.g. climate change) rather than the behavioural cause — so even in the best case they buy time rather than solve anything.
The mechanism proposed here (refined in Paper Two): behaviours that were once adaptive in early hominid evolution — the impulses to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to acquire/amass/defend resources, to display dominance/status/sex appeal, and to discount distant costs (procrastination, temporal/social/spatial discounting) — have been intentionally and systematically exploited by modern techno-industrial (MTI) economic and marketing systems. What was once fitness-promoting at small scale becomes collectively suicidal at industrial scale.
The three drivers
The paper identifies three critical drivers that catalyse and perpetuate the behavioural crisis, each mapping onto a lever of overshoot:
| Driver | Overshoot lever it drives | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Economic Growth | Consumption | The economy reframed as boundless rather than embedded in biophysical limits; fossil energy (1,300-fold increase in 200 years) financed a 100-fold increase in real gross world product, normalising the belief that growth is unconstrained and substitutable |
| Marketing | Consumption, waste | Shift from functional differentiation to identity/status-based selling; behavioural targeting via surveillance data (hundreds of trillions of tracking events/year); framing effects (Tversky & Kahneman) used to make overconsumption feel good |
| Pronatalism | Population | Social/institutional pressure to reproduce (patriarchy, religion, nationalism, capitalism), enforced through positive feedback (glorification of motherhood, financial incentives) and negative feedback (stigmatisation of childfree/LGBTQIA+/contraception) |
The three levers
The paper frames Ecological Overshoot itself as driven by three direct levers — population, consumption, and waste — see Levers of Overshoot for the full breakdown.
The proposed response
Rather than treat marketing, media and entertainment purely as the problem, the paper argues they are the most realistic lever for intervention precisely because they already have the infrastructure, reach, and proven methods to reshape Social Norms at speed (e.g. telenovela-based family-planning campaigns in Ethiopia/Brazil; drink-driving stigmatisation over decades; social-convention tipping points shown to occur once ~25% of a population adopts a new norm). The ask is to redirect these same persuasion tools toward genuinely adaptive behaviours — flying less, having fewer children, consuming less — framed around benefits to the individual rather than sacrifice, since behaviour change that doesn't feel rewarding won't persist.
The paper closes by flagging the double-edged nature of this proposal: behavioural influence at this scale is already happening (by whoever has the money and reach to do it), so the real choice is whether it continues to deepen overshoot, is left to chance, or is consciously and ethically redirected — and it calls for interdisciplinary oversight of large-scale behavioural manipulation.
See Human Behavioural Crisis for how this argument connects to Paper Two's formal mechanism.
Reception and impact
The paper substantially outperformed typical expectations for a mini-review in a niche journal:
- Altmetric Attention Score: ranked in the top 1% of all research outputs Altmetric has ever tracked — a status the paper still held as of a September 2025 update talk by Joseph Merz, two years after publication.
- Downloads/reads: approximately 70,000 by early-to-mid 2024, rising to almost 75,000 by September 2025. At peak, the paper was averaging roughly 4,000 reads and downloads a month across platforms (per Joseph Merz, LinkedIn).
- Editor's Pick: selected as Editor's Pick by Science Progress.
- Press coverage: covered by The Guardian ("Human behaviour crisis drives earth overshoot," February 2024), which was itself republished by multiple outlets.
- Academic/civic amplification: featured by Stanford's Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB), covered in Victoria University of Wellington's own news service (commentary by co-author Dr Michael Joy), and discussed in the peak-oil and degrowth community (e.g. the long-running Peak Oil Barrel discussion forum), showing reach well beyond the paper's home discipline.
- Broadcast: the subject of a dedicated podcast episode, Oh, behave! The real reason for overshoot, in which Joseph Merz discussed the paper's reception directly with the host.
Not yet independently verified: Institute records referred to coverage in Vogue and The Economist as well. A search did not turn up independent confirmation of either — flag to Joseph for a link or citation before relying on this claim publicly.