Abstract for: A Systems Approach to Populist Climate Obstruction - A Starting Point for Interdisciplinary Exchange

In the past years, populist climate obstruction is a spreading phenomenon in media, society and politics. Different approaches try to explain the causes and interdependencies of this form of populism. However, our literature research revealed that for analysing the complex interrelations between media, society, politics and individual climate attitudes no systems mapping approaches were applied. Such visual systems mapping can help to integrate the knowledge from different disciplines. A Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) is developed based on the scientific knowledge of the three authors and on an unstructured literature research. The CLD does not aim to be complete or validated. Its purpose is of acting as a starting point for an interdisciplinary discourse for integrating knowledge from different fields from social science, political science and media studies working in the field of climate action and populism. The CLD shows that populist climate obstruction is mainly caused by the anti-climate attitudes within the civil society, anti-climate social norms and the low societal acceptance of effective politics fostering climate action. It shows several reinforcing and balancing feedback loops explaining systems behaviour. However, the results of the CLD should be taken with care, because a validation process by involving knowledge from different disciplines is needed. The CLD should act as an input to invite experts from different disciplines involved in this topic to further develop this CLD within participatory systems modelling (Group Model Building) workshops. This also intents transferring future application of systems modelling in scientific fields where those approaches are not familiar but useful to better manage complexity and effective knowledge integration to describe interdisciplinary processes. Miro AI used for feedback loop identification, Chat GPT used for text improvements