Our summer content creator and Economics student, Martha Pykett, reflects on economics, attention and sustainability

I often think sustainability organisations are trying to change the world through information, but every day we have more information than any previous generation, yet this ‘knowing’ appears not to translate into doing. However, after spending a summer creating content  for the Global Goals Centre, I began to wonder whether information isn’t the scarce resource anymore, but attention is. The real challenge isn’t producing solutions – it’s helping them compete for space in an increasingly crowded information economy. I should distinguish that by ‘attention’, I don’t mean media attention from policymakers or large organisations, important though that is. I mean the everyday attention of the public as before anyone chooses to recycle or volunteer, the issue must first succeed in earning a place in their mental bandwidth. 

When you first begin an Economics degree, one of the first principles you encounter is that scarcity underpins traditional economic reasoning. However with economies becoming increasingly digitalised, the nature of scarcity itself is shifting. Information, once costly to produce and distribute, now exists in near abundance. In this environment, a new scarce resource determines in what way information is allocated. Due to individuals being unable to attend to everything, attention becomes the binding constraint. Every moment  spent watching celebrity gossip or football highlights rather than a sustainability reel illustrates a familiar economic idea: opportunity cost*. Inside a digital economy saturated with content, what matters is the competition for the limited attention through which it is consumed.

Before I began this internship, I somewhat naively assumed that social media equates to promotion when in fact I realised it is more aligned with competition. This distinction completely reshaped how I approached communication. Rather than producing posts based solely  on what I think people should know, I began designing content that interrupts the scroll – something that earns a moment of attention in an environment engineered to withhold it. While this could be assessed as manipulation, I would argue it is about recognising  the scarcity that algorithms create. Attention only feels limited because platforms deliberately make it so.

So why does all of this matter for sustainability? The climate movement is not short of good ideas – it is short of attention. Community gardens, repair cafes, restoration projects: these are not hypothetical solutions, they already exist. All of these projects can be  pivotal in the climate challenge yet time and time again they fall short of their potential. This is not because they do not work but because they fail to gain attention. This sort of competition forces sustainability into the same dynamics as any market.

All ideas will compete, some will diffuse and others will disappear completely. When compared in such a way, Instagram becomes far less trivial and instead, becomes a more imperative tool in inspiring the way in which sustainable behaviours are spread.

But attention alone is not the goal. Social media can encourage shallow engagement as easily as meaningful action. The real challenge is not to simply go viral but to direct attention towards conversations and community actions that endure beyond the screen.

*the cost of what you give up when you choose one option over another.  

Martha Pykett August 2026