The tragedy of cognitive biases — Mohsen Anvaari Photography

The Tragedy of Cognitive Biases

A visual story of human inaction towards climate change adaptation

While environmental activists constantly warn us that climate change is happening rapidly, and in the scale of history, they are right, psychologists and neurosciences believe that from the viewpoint of the human brain these changes are happening slowly—so slowly that it does not trigger proper action from most of us! The human brain computes and reacts very fast to a rapid object coming towards the head. Even though, it is not wired to react properly to threats such as climate change that happen at a slow pace and on a geographically large scale. Therefore, in handling our relationship with environmental issues, we are exposed to several cognitive biases. These biases lead to decisions that might be beneficial for an individual in the short term, but are collectively often not rational and, therefore, accumulate harmful results in the long term. It is, hence, very essential that in the human-environment relationship, the responsibility of decision making and its consequences gets removed from the shoulders of individuals and gets done by institutes and organizations that have holistic overview on the ecosystem, its ecological capacities and climate trends. In any region where that holistic view towards the ecosystem and its ecological capacities is absent, individuals have no choice than to make decisions intuitively, and they often do so until they lose the battle to the climate change and limited ecological capacities of the region.

In this photo reportage, I am narrating the story of one of the thousand regions in the planet that have faced the effect of climate change on their ecosystem, and where the people have a bitter fate in their lack of holistic view and long-perspective management. The reportage is published in Iranian magazine Tejarate-Farda.

Kamfiruz Plain, at an elevation of 1,700 m, in the middle of June 2019. The mountain in the background is Barmfiruz with a 3,720 m elevation, and it receives the highest amount of snow in Fars province during the winter time. Kor River originated partially from that mountain, then it goes through Kamfiruz Plain and reaches Doroudzan Dam. Around 30,000 people are living in Kamfiruz and they are mostly farmers. More than 6,000 hectares of land in this region are two crops (wheat and rice), meaning that the farmers do stubble burning to the wheat fields and use the land for rice at the same year, which leads to overconsumption of water resources.

The atmosphere around Doroudzan Lake is very polluted in June. The fields are getting ready for planting rice

The end of Kamfiruz Plain where Kor River reaches Doroudzan Lake. In the middle of June 2019, all fields are in a flooded condition, some have been rice planted already and the rest will be until the end of June.

Behnam, 30 years old, and all of his brothers are rice farmers in Kamfiruz. After buying a rice planter machine, they work for other field owners, besides planting their own farms.

8000 liters of water is consumed to produce one kg of rice, due to high evaporation in this region!

In spite of over normal precipitation this winter, Kor River is not enough to plant all fields in Kamfiruz. Some farmers use a water hole, which is illegal.

Lunch at one of Kamfiruz houses. Although the drought has affected the whole of Iran and the country is facing strong sanctions which have an impact on its import, rice is still the dominant crop in the Iranian family food.

Only 100 km far from Kamfiruz, Korbal Plain, July 2019. This is one of the dozens of abandoned villages in the area. The fields in the background are a part of 14,000 hectares that were rice fields before the persistent drought began, and they are all arid. The water channel that passes through the picture is one of the 108 channels branching from Kor River, and now it is dry. The villages in this area were home to 50,000 people before the drought.

Houses have gradually been destroyed after people migrated. The doors and windows are taken away to be used or sold.

The abandoned school of the village. 700 students were studying there before.

One of the classrooms

After the higher than normal precipitation of this winter, some farmers are back to plant their farms. Running or underground water is still not enough for wheat or rice, so they are planting safflower. Safflower looks like saffron without its taste or smell, so it is used by some bakeries as a cheap substitute for saffron.

This farmer, who is 60 years old and has five children, is suffering from asthma. Even so, she is back to her farms to harvest safflower this year. Each person collects around 1 kg of safflower per day and sells it for 30,000 tomans (2 euro) to the mediators. Their family has a 4 million tomans (267 euros) debt to the government for farming, which is hard to repay with their current income.

The destiny of nature and people in all areas of the riverbank of Kor has not become like Korbal yet, but all are vulnerable. The left photo was taken in July 2018 in Kamfiruz Plain. The water hole of the farm was dry, the rice field could not survive. Some people of Kamfiruz had started migration, like the people of Korbal. The right photo shows how lively the rice field became in July 2019. All those people were happily back to Kamfiruz, and all fields were planted. Long-term predictions and scientific simulations show that such a fruitful year is an exception not the norm. The right thing to do, hence, is to adapt to the new drier climatoglogical normal. But will a long-perspective holistic view finally find a way to the nature-environment relationship?