What are indirect effects?

Indirect effects are when something happens because of another thing that happened before it, but not right away.

Imagine you're playing with building blocks. You push one block, and it falls over. Then the next block falls too, and the next one after that. The first block falling made all the others fall eventually, even though they weren’t pushed directly.

Indirect effects are like that, something starts a chain of events, and other things happen because of it, but not in the same moment.

Think of a pond. If you throw a rock into the water, the rock hits the surface first, that’s the direct effect. But then the water moves outwards in ripples, those are indirect effects. The rock caused the ripples, but they weren’t the same thing as the rock hitting the water.

So just like the rock causes rippling water later on, one event can cause other things to happen a little bit after, and that’s what we call indirect effects.