Collective action is required to enter sustainable development pathways in coupled social-ecological systems, safely away from dangerous tipping elements. Shortsightedness and uncertainty have hindered progress in resolving this collective action problem and have been recognized as important barriers to cooperation between humans.
Here, we propose a coupled social-ecological dilemma to investigate the interdependence of three well-identified components of this cooperation problem: i) time scales of collapse and recovery and time preferences on future outcomes, ii) the magnitude of the collapse impact, and iii) the number of actors in the collective.
We find that, under a sufficiently severe and time-distant collapse, the actors’ own parameter of how much they care for the future can transform the game from a tragedy of the commons into a coordination challenge and even into a comedy of the commons in which cooperation dominates.
Our results help explain why polarization in beliefs about human-caused climate change can threaten global cooperation agreements.