By Thontowi Suhada, researcher of Wahana Riset Indonesia.

What is the link between climate change and actress Chelsea Islan? The Director of WRI Indonesia announced an exciting opportunity, where one person will be selected to sit with Chelsea Islan as a speaker at an environmental event. The requirement is that the person must understand and be able to articulate the progress of environmental issues. What happened? As you can imagine, suddenly the office was bursting with discussion of environmental issues in the future. It was a race to be the best on the forefront of the issue.

The rhythm of life in WRI is new to me. I've had a lot of experience with research and projects, but mostly in short-term research ranging from three to six months. Here, I have to do research in a period of more than a year. Maintaining the enthusiasm and effort will become relatively more difficult with such a long research process. Fortunately, WRI provides interesting dynamics during the long process. Having the opportunity to sit with Chelsea Islan, for example, creates new passion and excitement. Furthermore, WRI Indonesia holds practical trainings periodically and once a month, we pitch and present the research we have done. All staff, regardless of background, can participate and provide input. Keeping the spirits up is needed to maintain the rhythm of individuals and organizations and achieve long-term goals.

The behavioral economist Ariely explains that the vision for the future is one of the greatest advantages of human beings compared to other living things. On a certain level, we are able to predict what will happen in the future. Unfortunately, some of our brains do not develop to follow the vision. We tend to ignore what happens in the future, especially when it means we have to sacrifice our happiness in the present moment. The simplest example is a healthy lifestyle. We understand that heart disease, obesity, and cancer will appear later in life if we do not have a healthy lifestyle now. Yet, we still say that we will exercise "tomorrow instead.”

So what is the solution? Ariely suggests a trick to overcome the problem: design a gift for yourself whenever doing visionary things. One cup of yogurt after exercise can be a fun, short-term motivation. When speaking in a larger context such as climate change, we often focus more on explaining what disasters will happen in the future, but forget to build an incentive system to encourage behavioral changes in the short-term. For example, has our government translated its emission reduction targets into an incentive-based system? Failure to understand human behavior patterns in the short-term means that we plan for long-term failure. Maybe we just need more incentives, such as discussions with Chelsea Islan, to encourage changes in our behavior in tackling climate change.