The Decision-making Gap – Closing the gap between viewpoints where trade-offs or complex decisions need to be made.

The more the crisis is felt, the more that taking effective climate action relies on being able to navigate between conflicting viewpoints on a range of issues where different priorities, values and beliefs often arise. Take, for example, agreeing on who should pay for the costs of energy transitions or climate-related damage, what is fair in relation to the impact of policies on different communities, how to balance job creation with green transitions, or how to protect people displaced by climate disasters. The difficulty of closing the gaps between opposing views and interests continues to be a major barrier to the scale and speed of climate action that is needed.

When decision makers listen, collective intelligence initiatives can help to close this decision-making gap in a number of ways. For example: by soliciting contributions from a diverse range of people to uncover a wider range of insights for more informed decision making, by promoting the sharing of data and knowledge between people to help build collective understanding of a climate related problem, or by supporting decision making processes through structured techniques for deliberation.