Teachers – looking for worthwhile activities post SATs or GCSE’s? Here are two free online workshops to stimulate climate conversations between your students.

Dear colleagues,

In June 2021, I recorded two workshops aimed at Y6 and above for the Schools Climate Education Conference in South Yorkshire. The workshops are still available and are free. Below you’ll find a few notes explaining my approach; I hope these will help you decide whether to use the workshops or not. At the bottom, you will find some notes on specific slides/exercises.

The workshop recordings can be found here: https://www.scesy.org.uk/day2-climate-conversations/

Climate conversations: how to get young people talking about the climate emergency

In all climate education efforts, we have to balance the ‘bad news’ about how urgent the crisis is with the ‘good news’ about all the positive developments currently taking place. I don’t think there is any easy answer to the question ‘what is the right balance?’ I think you have to sense where your pupils are, at any given moment. It is important not to avoid difficult questions, topics or viewpoints, otherwise the young people may feel you’re not being completely straight with them. On the other hand, there is no doubt that talking about climate change can stir up difficult feelings for young people (and for adults – it’s one reason why we don’t talk about it enough!)

My rule of thumb, taken from George Marshall, the founder of Climate Outreach, is “place negative information in a narrative arc that leads to a positive resolution.” In other words, don’t avoid the difficult topics, recognise them, recognise the feelings they may bring up, but then build a sense of hope and agency by moving the discussion onto solutions – what the young people (and others) can actually do to make a difference.

That will of course be more convincing if you, as staff, and the school overall are seen to be taking consistent action too.

The young people on the last climate conversations course that I led reported that they felt relieved and encouraged to talk about these issues with their peers, from a personal perspective, not just an informational one. Young people know that the problem exists but they often can’t see how they can relate to it or what they can do about it. Hearing their peers’ feelings and views can be reassuring. The same is true of adults:  none of us can solve this problem on our own, we can feel powerless too, but we feel better when we see that we are part of a cultural shift towards a sustainable society.

When the solutions that are needed are clearly beyond what young people or ordinary adult citizens have the power to do, then shift the discussion onto what they think governments and big businesses can do. Obviously, this risks veering into overtly political territory, but there are well-established pedagogical principles in schools (e.g. within citizenship, politics and economics) of teaching impartially about the role of government, seen from different perspectives. Since the UK government signed a declaration of climate emergency, the topic has moved firmly onto the mainstream political agenda, and the moral case for educating young people about it, both the problems and the solutions, is undeniable.

(It may be useful to offer further support to any young person who is experiencing eco-anxiety.)

Facilitation of the workshops:

I ended up with (I think) enough material for two one-hour lessons. I apologise if I didn’t calculate this quite right; these are my first recorded workshops. I’m used to being able to ‘read the room’. The material in the second workshop is a bit more grown-up – especially the final exercise on values. In introducing this exercise, I emphasised the importance of respecting your conversation partner but you may want to reinforce that point.

I would encourage you to see these as workshops rather than lessons, and you may need to explain that. The aim is to lead the young people into having meaningful conversations and to give them some tips and tools for making these more likely to happen with family and friends outside of the classroom. The aim is not to test the young people’s knowledge and understanding of climate change.

However, if you feel that it is appropriate, given what is coming up in their discussions, to feed in certain key facts that would reassure the young people and support them in initiating their own conversations, of course do so. If I had longer, I myself would probably include some exercises about the basic facts of global warming that are useful for all of us to know when talking to family and friends (what is now commonly referred to as ‘carbon literacy’.) For example, as an early exercise, I often ask students to prepare a short presentation in groups explaining what global warming is, in an interesting way. Feel free to adapt these materials if you think it would be helpful to add in more information-based exercises, but please do keep the emphasis on promoting constructive dialogue, rather than right or wrong answers. (I don’t think any of us knows all the answers to this one!)

I have indicated in the video where I am suggesting that the young people talk and for how long. You may, of course, want to manage that differently. If you need to keep the pace up, you may prefer to have a quick whole class brainstorm rather than work in pairs, but I have included a lot of work in pairs because it allows people to do their own thinking, to practice their asking and listening skills, and to have a degree of confidentiality.

Below you will find some notes that explain what the various terms and pictures are.

I hope you’ll have a go! Perhaps you will feel inspired to have more climate conversations yourself…

Best wishes,

Nick Nuttgens

Co-Convenor, Climate Communications Hub, Sheffield

nuttgensclimate@outlook.com

Notes on specific slides/exercises

Workshop 1 
Terms exerciseSame meaning: Global warming / climate change / global heating / global weirding (the latter isn’t very widespread but it has been proposed as a way to explain that global warming isn’t a smooth trend but gives rise to lots of strange extreme weather events.) ‘Global heating’ is being used more e.g. by some newspapers to heighten the sense of danger; ‘warming’ sounds too innocuous and ‘change’ is too vague.  
Same meaning: Biodiversity crisis / ecological emergency – and species extinction is one aspect of that.   Air pollution is a different matter – but it is related in that it is usually caused by fossil fuels.  
Workshop 2 
Picture exercise: actions people can take to reduce their carbon emissions.Travel by high-speed train instead of aeroplane
Eat less beef and more plant-based food
Wear pre-loved clothes
Buy an electric car (or get your guardian to)
Cycle instead of asking your guardian for a lift
Learn how to insulate houses so they need the minimum of heating
Buy plant-based trainers*
Email or visit your local MP or councillor to tell them you care Save electricity (e.g. wash your clothes on the eco-cycle)
Join demonstrations calling for action from politicians *”Replacing leather with figs, potatoes, coconuts and even pineapples, these plant-based shoes are good enough to eat”.  
Picture exercise: pictures related to climate change.Teacher – you may want to ask which images they discussed and then give them a bit of information about them (remembering that the aim of the workshop is to get them doing the talking.)
Cement and concrete production causes a high level of carbon emissions – about 8% of the total globally. Ice cores are one of the ways that scientists can discover how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere in past centuries.
When cows burp and fart, they produce methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas.
Buses and cars could in future be powered by hydrogen, but not everybody agrees that this would be a good thing.
British designer Kate Morris was named the winner of the EcoChic Design Award 2017, following the grand final in Hong Kong.
Fertilisers made from nitrogen help crop production but they also produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is 300 time stronger than carbon dioxide. 2020 was the largest wildfire season recorded in California’s modern history.
In 2019, Extinction Rebellion protesters dressed up as ghostly figures in blood red costumes to draw attention to the problem of climate change.
The gases produced by refrigeration are a major contributor to global warming. Project Drawdown has identified resolving the refrigeration problem as one of the central challenges of becoming sustainable.
In 2019, Sheffield experienced floods. Floods are likely to be one of the main impacts of climate change in the UK.
The Panda Solar Power Plant in Datong in China is shaped like the country’s treasured animal.
The Paris agreement in 2015 was the first time that all the world’s governments agreed to cut their carbon emissions, with the aim of limiting global warming to 1.5°.
UK electric car ownership jumped 53% in 2020. There are now more than 20,000 charge points across the country.
This house in Fulford, near York, is a ‘passive house’. Its walls are so thick that it doesn’t need any heating. So no bills!  
Slide 42If your class wants some tips on how to handle friends and relatives who are climate sceptics, there is a useful YouTube video here: George Marshall video: How to talk to a climate change denier:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp-nJKBwQR4 For a short summary, play the final section – 16 mins to the end. However, please note that he uses the phrase ‘pissed off’ and this may not be suitable for your students/school.

Will the next UK election produce the leaders the planet needs? Or are we going to have to look outside the box?

For those of us in the UK who want to see something serious done soon about the climate and nature emergencies, what are the chances? In a previous post, I shared the work of Hope for the Future, who give wonderful advice on how to approach MPs constructively, and word has it that more MPs are now accepting the environmental agenda, even if they aren’t yet speaking up about it. However, progress feels slow and the country doesn’t yet have a leader who truly ‘gets it’ – see my post on a draft Person Spec for the next PM. So where will we be by the time of the next election in 2024 (or earlier)?

Time to look outside the box for the leaders we need?

What we need is for the next government to be one that is wholly committed to making the sustainability transition central to everything it does, providing an overarching strategy and appropriate legislation to ensure that the private sector as well as the public sector falls in line and both use their innovation and creativity to generate a million solutions to a million problems.

As fast as possible.

Because we need to halve carbon emissions by 2030 if we want to stay below 1.5° of warming.

And that transformation needs to be global, so not only do we need to make radical changes in the UK, we need to set an example and then persuade the rest of the world’s developed economies to follow suit.

How likely is it that we will get such a government? The current Conservative government – and maybe any future Conservative government – although containing some dedicated environmentalists, is most deeply dedicated to the small state and the free market.

And the level playing field we need cannot be provided without state-led legislation, rigorous monitoring and effective support. 

So the only hope for a Conservative government is for those people who are genuinely environmentalist within the party to win the battle of ideas and take over the party. The Environmental Audit Committee of MPs is doing fantastic work, as far as I can see. It seems to be covering a wide range of topics, acknowledging the real challenges and doing its best to make other departments aware of what needs to happen. And the Conservative Environment Network is also plugging away, trying to get more MPs on board and increasing their awareness. 

But I really don’t know how much power these people have against the vested interests in favour of the fossil fuel companies and the small staters. I fear that they are just a handful of idealists who at best will only be able to nudge their colleagues towards a few token actions, rather than the necessary systemic shift. The whole Net Zero Strategy frankly smacks of this: loads of pages saying quite a few of the right things but unfortunately also saying a number of completely inadequate things, shoved together to give an impression of the government taking the subject seriously – when in fact, we have seen very little substantial action at all since it was published. 

My suspicions about the ineffectiveness of the environmentally minded Conservative MPs might be allayed if they would own up honestly to the problems of duplicitous fossil fuel companies, the philosophy of perpetual growth, libertarian opposition to regulation, etc. A convincing strategy not only lays out the vision and the steps towards that vision, it also identifies the likely obstacles and the solutions to them. I’m not seeing that level of realism and honesty from these people yet. So, despite their sincere efforts, I am not convinced we can rely on the Conservative government.*

On the other hand, what are the chances of Labour getting in and doing the job? On his website, Starmer has a good page on the Green New Deal. The trouble is, he is not putting it up front as the key plank of his vision. He is still playing a game of focus group politics, saying things he hopes will appeal to red wall voters and swing voters, but not telling them the truth. Hardly compelling leadership for a time of historic and existential threat. 

It’s not a totally hopeless case; were Labour to get in, with the commitments it has outlined so far, there is a chance that those in the party who do understand the urgency and severity of the crisis would push Starmer to enact a ‘green industrial revolution’, but would they go deeper? Would they question patterns of overconsumption? Would they maintain the assumption of continual growth? Would they be capable of doing the new thinking that is needed and of taking the population with them? 

Even more worryingly, are they capable of even winning the election? There is some hope that the Tories will have sufficiently alienated voters to lose the next one and Starmer may ascend the throne by default. But for me, at the moment, neither he nor his party are presenting a compelling, truthful vision and plan. And that suggests to me that they really still don’t get it; we can’t save the planet with a collection of fragmented short-term projects designed to appeal to those who don’t really understand the problem. It absolutely has to be a concerted project of radical change – all hands on deck, or we all sink.

A progressive coalition government might be a better solution than relying on Labour alone. For that to happen, we probably need to see a progressive alliance during the run-up to the election. Not only might this usher in proportional representation, allowing more environmentally concerned candidates into Parliament in the future, but I would hope that Caroline Lucas (and perhaps some other green MPs) could shift Labour and the Lib Dems in the direction of a root and branch sustainability strategy.

That seems the best hope to me, in terms of working in the mainstream. However, I don’t know what the current state of play is, regarding a progressive alliance. It’s worrying that it hasn’t worked out in the past. 

The other, more radical fantasy I have is that those of us who do truly get it prepare an alternative government in waiting. Because, frankly, the current lot may well be too embroiled in ineffective ways of doing things.**

I guess this implies a coup d’état; it may come to that. We can’t just stand by and watch while a bunch of Ministers of dubious competence, who are ideologically and financially in cahoots with denialists and delayists, obstruct the actions necessary to save human civilisation. As far as I’m concerned, it is the job of a democratically elected government to act in the interests of the nation as a whole and to attend to long-term threats as well as short-term ones. If the current lot are not doing the job, they’re going to have to go. 

But the terrors of the French Revolution are a doleful warning to us all. Any extra-parliamentary, alternative party or movement would have to be fundamentally committed to non-violent, collaborative, constructive dialogue and the collective and individual enactment of the Nolan principles.

As a start, I propose that a consortium of environmental NGOs and campaigning organisations puts together a leadership training programme based on the above principles and a 100% commitment to a rapid and fair transition. They should look around for bright and committed individuals from all sectors of the population who have the existing abilities and the potential to step up as capable leaders for a new sustainable society.

Not only should these candidates have thoroughgoing Carbon Literacy training, but they should also have or be given practical skills development in: 

  • Project design and management 
  • Systems thinking
  • Long term strategic planning 
  • Coalition building and mediation between different ideologies/persuasions 
  • Critical thinking and emotional literacy 
  • Public engagement and communications 
  • Government structures and processes
  • Team leadership
  • Ethics – including how to apply the Nolan Principles

Believe it or not, some MPs don’t have these skills when they are elected; they have to acquire them in post. There will be loads of learning on the job for the new generation of leaders because they will face unprecedented challenges but we do need people who can spring into action with purpose, clarity and realism. 

And there may well need to be a parallel training for civil servants.

I am living with cancer and don’t have the energy to take the lead on this but if anybody wants to do it, I’d love to be on your steering group.

* For any Conservatives who read this, I mean things like: confronting those neoliberals (or whatever you want to call them) who put profit above all else and scorn concern about environmental ‘externalities’; questioning those libertarians who are opposed to all forms of regulation; pinning down those pragmatists who are in effect defeatist, saying it’s all too late anyway; engaging with the organicists who question all forms of short-term radical change, etc. Regarding the role of the state, I was very interested that the facilitator of a webinar run by the Coalition for Conservation in Australia, and a Conservative herself, asked the panel: how do you all feel about the fact that combating climate change will probably require a greater degree of state intervention than we Conservatives normally feel comfortable with?

**I see that Vaclav Havel had a similar concept when he was a dissident in Czechoslovakia in the 1980’s – a “parallel polis”. 

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/vaclav-havels-lessons-on-how-to-create-a-parallel-polis/amp

A Person Specification for the Prime Minister we really need

Early in February 2022, it looked like Prime Minister Boris Johnson might soon be out of a job. Subsequent events have probably protected him for a while. But when he does eventually go, will the U.K. get the leader it really needs? If you were a head hunter looking for exceptional candidates to lead the country through an historic transition to a sustainable economy, who would you short-list from our current MPs? Or would you be looking elsewhere?

Here is my draft advert and person specification. Comments very much welcomed.

If you think this is interesting, please share it. You can  subscribe to future posts on the right. It only takes a few seconds. Rest assured: you won’t be inundated. I only write posts occasionally.

Exceptionally able leader needed to guide and inspire the people of the United Kingdom through an epoch-making transition to a sustainable economy. 

The people of the UK, along with populations across the world, are facing the dire implications of the ever worsening climate and nature emergencies, with continuing rises in global temperatures, greenhouse gas emissions, rates of extinctions, pollution and waste. The window of opportunity for containing the already inevitable damage is getting smaller by the day. The issues are now on the political agenda and public understanding of the necessity for action is increasing slowly but a massive cultural shift is now required, comparable to but greater than the transformation of the economy at the time of World War II.

Those who truly appreciate the urgency of the situation, despite its insidious invisibility much of the time, realise this is the time for exceptionally committed and capable individuals to step forward to take the country by the hand. The scientific data is undeniable; the United Kingdom, along with its partners in the United Nations, cannot wait until the state of the world becomes so catastrophic that its people finally grasp the necessity for decisive action.

The country needs courageous and fiercely determined leadership to inspire a vision for transformation that workers in all sectors will be willing to contribute to with hope and whole hearts. While no individual Prime Minister or Cabinet can impose a deep cultural shift upon the country, systemic change nonetheless requires clear signals and effective action from the top, with legislation creating a level playing field marked out by unequivocally clear parameters, the disabling of dangerous obstacles and the creation of motivational, practical incentives.

Candidates are invited to step forward who believe themselves capable of shouldering this enormous but exceptionally exciting leadership challenge. They should have as many of the following competencies as possible.

  • A profound understanding of the climate and nature emergencies, the possible solutions thereto and the structural transformation that is required
  • Courage and determination to take the helm of the nation
  • Powerful communicator to explain the situation, tell the truth, convey the urgency, and inspire belief and excitement within the population – in order to generate a shared vision and determination 
  • Sharp thinking strategist, capable of working with experts within government and without to identify and implement the most potent political and legal levers for change 
  • Real world experience of designing, implementing and monitoring systemic change 
  • Ability to carry through the necessary long term transformation whilst also managing and integrating shorter term demands
  • Ability to speak to all sectors of civil society and convince them that the transition will be fair, that we really are all in this together
  • Political expertise to engage all arms of government and the state in a joined up strategy
  • Ability to transcend political divides and build a committed coalition for change
  • Intelligent mediator within own party, able to understand the values and dreams of each faction and enable them to find a mutually acceptable visionary programme
  • Excellent manager and delegator, able to select, direct and collaborate with ministers for decarbonisation attached to each sector of the economy
  • Confident leader on the international stage, able to use the prominence of the U.K. to build a global commitment to a rapid sustainability transition and to minimise the risks of conflict
  • Principled adherent to the Nolan principles of Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty and Leadership.

We are also looking for first rate Ministers and parliamentarians to support the new Prime Minister.

This huge and exciting challenge cannot be met by a single individual. The new Prime Minister will need a government and a parliament of unparalleled skill and intellectual ability, each and every person committed to the team effort and to the highest standards of probity. Candidates are therefore also sought for the next general election who are fundamentally committed to:

  1. Designing and taking decisive actions for the rapid decarbonisation of the UK economy, to half of its current levels by 2030;
  2. Ensuring that the transformation commands the support of the general population and protects their livelihoods (a just transition);
  3. Observing the Nolan principles in everything that they do.


Might you be one of these people? Do you know someone who might be? This is a time for people with truly great leadership skills and potential to step forwards and make history. 

Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning?

This is one of a series of posts entitled Principles and Advice for Grassroots Climate Communicators, in which I share and reflect on a range of different ideas within the field, with a view to helping grassroots activists and groups communicate effectively. For an overview of approaches and challenges in the field, please see my post Climate Communications – An Overview. A summary of the key points made in this post can be found at the bottom.

Rather than blaming people for their apathy, isn’t up to us, as climate communicators, to be skilful in generating their interest?[1] In 2017, I went to a conference called ‘Avoiding Myth, Mayhem and Myopia: the challenge of climate science communication’ organised by the Royal Meteorological Society and the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. The debate was about how to get over the scientific facts of climate change to the general public. It was felt that in the early days of climate change communications, most presentations were too scientific, too technical, with lots of off-putting graphs and technical terms, not to mention difficult concepts and philosophical frames.

In aiming to help the public to understand what is going on, we shouldn’t forget that the climate is an enormously complex phenomenon.[2] In Global Warming, A Very Short Introduction, Mark Maslin did a great job of making at least some of the science comprehensible to me (an artist through and through) but I remember finally throwing my hands in the air when he started talking about how much salt there was in the deep ocean currents. The oceans, the clouds, the vegetation, the animals all interact in complex ways – and that’s without the intrusion of us humans.

At the end of the conference, one of the leading science educators said she thought the solution lay in the arts. And I heard a politician saying the same thing at another conference. Obviously one thing that climate scientists can do is to learn how to put over the information in more accessible and interesting ways. But maybe we can be more creative than that. Maybe we can draw on the power of visuals, of music, of stories, of drama, etc. to reach into people’s emotions, engage their imaginations and, through the power of empathy, engage them with the ethical dilemmas that global heating throws up. In this blog, I offer a few examples from the literature that I hope will help you to think about these possibilities.

If the arts aren’t your thing, you should bear in mind our recurrent dilemma as climate communicators, that we are still not succeeding in getting the general public to fully understand the seriousness of what is happening. Is it an impossible task? As a former teacher, I say not. But we are going to have to draw on the very best skills in teaching and communication.

Using the arts to engage and communicate

Creative activities are often appealing to the general public – especially those with younger children – and powerful works of art can engage people of all ages and classes, stimulating thought, emotion and imagination. For these reasons, there has been a long association between the arts and social change. In the 1930s, the US government set up an extensive arts programme to help the country recover from the Depression. The Theatre in Education movement developed in the UK in the 1960s and has inspired creative approaches to education across the world. In my own experience, the Creative Partnerships programme in the early 2000s brought thousands of artists into schools to work alongside teachers and pupils on projects that aimed to combine the stimulation of creativity with the deepening of learning.[3]

Arts practitioners are increasingly getting involved in climate communications, often working in partnership with climate scientists to break through the veils of disavowal.[1] One high-profile example was 2071, a “dramatised lecture” written by Chris Rapley, a climate scientist, and playwright Duncan MacMillan, first performed in 2014 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. When I took two friends to see it, they were knocked out. It was basically just a fancy lecture with projections and a soundscape, but the combination of theatrical imagery and hearing what was happening from the horse’s mouth – from somebody who had actually been in the Arctic – had changed their perspective. They had known about climate change before but the show had aroused powerful feelings in them about the crisis we were facing. I suspect that most people in that theatre felt the same, and being there together was part of the impact.

Looking to the grass roots, there is a lot of experience to draw on, here in Sheffield and all across the world. Reference has already been made to ‘Paradise is Here’, a practical guide to using creativity for community development, written by Ruth Nutter, based on her experiences working for the Guild of St George and in other settings.[4] Within South Yorkshire there are a large number of community arts practitioners, skilled in engaging both the general public and specific social groups, within a wide range of settings.[5] When I ran the Creative Partnerships programme here, we had hundreds of artists working in schools across the county.[2]

(This is not the place to go into detail about best practice, and the importance of training, both in terms of meeting the core communication challenge of combining entertainment with information, but also because we live in a time when concerns about safeguarding, health and safety and inclusivity are rightly high. But skilled creative practitioners do understand these concerns, whilst also bringing the stimulation of the unusual, the irreverent and the entertaining. I know – because I’ve seen them do it in schools. Unfortunately, that way of working has not established itself firmly in the educational mainstream, mostly because some politicians persist in seeing the arts as flaky.)

A note on street drama and performance

As I said, various forms of theatre have been effective in engaging members of the public of all classes with social issues. Story-based plays and films draw on the power of empathy and emotion; in contrast, street performance may be more visual, perhaps comic, intended to grab people’s attention as they pass. There is a wealth of experience and literature about all this but I want to drop in here a reminder, and a warning, to remember the importance of building rapport (see Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators for explanation). That’s not only something you have to do at the beginning of any type of performance but it’s also about you as a person or group appearing to be in tune with your audience’s values, priorities and style. George Marshall has been direct in warning environmental activists that some parts of the general population detest us! So you do need to give some attention to thinking about who you are and how you come over. If it happens to be that you are white, middle-class, middle-aged person with an RP accent, you need to be aware of that. If I asked you, would you be able to describe how you come over?

There is nothing wrong with being any of those things, but they/you/we do constitute a recognisable social sub-group and if they/you/we are speaking to people from a very different background or life experience, they will be aware of that difference. One solution, ironically, is simply to be yourself, not to pretend. Another is simply to be a warm, open person, because those qualities cross all boundaries.

Yet another solution is to produce skilful performances that appeal to the audience. If your aim is to engage a working class audience, you might want to bear in mind the checklist offered by the playwright/director John McGrath. He suggested that working class audiences tended to prefer shows that displayed directness, comedy, music, emotion, variety, moment-by-moment effect, immediacy and localism. I would add to that list – high production values. Even if you’re doing something very simple in the street you can have good costumes and props, for example. And you can get a good mic so you can be heard.

Alternatively, how much better would it be it if the performers looked and sounded like the people whose interest they were trying to attract – because they were those people! If people from a particular community have actually devised and created the performance themselves (‘co-production’), not only will the performers learn a lot in the process, the show is likely to be more relevant and appealing to the community, and the performers to come over as more passionate.

Just something to bear in mind.

Doing politics differently in an age of fantasy

A fundamental challenge to conventional ways of doing politics in general is offered by Stephen Duncombe in his 2007 book Dream – Re-Imagining Progressive Politics In An Age Of Fantasy.[6] Here I offer a brief synopsis to inspire discussion about the implications for climate communications.

Duncombe points to the prevalence of games, movies, social media memes, etc. in contemporary society, especially in the lives of people under 50 in developed countries. He questions the emphasis laid on rational argument by many on the left, dating back to the Enlightenment. We now live he says in a “society of the spectacle.” People prefer simple stories to complicated truths. Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world and those who capture the public attention will be those who tell the best stories and articulate an enticing dream of the future.

The big risk for progressives is that the far right will prove to be better at engaging the general public emotionally, in captivating them with their myths. Duncan asserts that progressive campaigners need to find their own ways to appeal to emotion, spectacle and myth. Progressives have a lot to learn from Las Vegas, he says.[7] The ideals of campaigners are often divorced from the dreams of the rest of the population. We need to understand their dreams – and then work collaboratively with them to explore different ways to achieve them.

The environmental movement has come to seem like an “advocacy firm” and can be intensely dull. Progressives who want to engage contemporary audiences, especially younger ones, need to think in terms of a video-game in which the player is a genuine participant. This is “transformative play” in which the players can determine the course of the action; such games turn spectators into producers.

Moreover, we now live in a culture where everybody is or wants to be a producer. It simply won’t work talking down to people. People want to be individually recognised. They want to make their own You-Tube channels, zines, blogs, websites, TV programmes, podcasts, etc.

Dreams are powerful; they are repositories of our desire. They can blind people to reality and provide cover for political horror. But they also can inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different. Spectacle is already part of our political and economic life; the important question is whose ethics does it embody and whose dreams does it express. The ethical spectacle is a means to imagine and debate new ends, potentially giving direction and motivation.

Progressive dreams, and the spectacles that give them tangible form, will look different from those conjured up by politicians or commercial directors – different not only in content but in form. Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams the public can mould and shape themselves. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers.

I think there is much in the above for climate communicators, including creative practitioners, to think hard about. In essence, Duncombe is advising us to think holistically about our audiences, to go beyond mere rational argument. As I’ve said elsewhere in these blogs, I think rational arguments – and critical thinking in general – need more prominence in the climate of debate but equally we need to grapple with a deeper sort of communication. The social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, describes the human psyche as being like a huge elephant with a small rider on top of it. The rider is the conscious self; the elephant is the far bigger unconscious.

In Climate Communications – An Overview, I told how the novelist Amitav Ghosh rejected the idea of fiction as an instrument for conveying messages and instead suggested that literature enabled people to engage in a deeper way with the complex, existential nature of the crisis that humanity faces. Whether it is a matter of taking account of the unconscious or facing up to the profound philosophical challenges raised by the climate and nature emergencies, I certainly think we need to draw on every resource available to us, and to keep thinking as we go. We can’t sit around and only philosophise when the situation is so urgent and yet it is imperative that we don’t pounce on simplistic and ultimately problematic solutions. I can’t remember now who it was that said we need to go fast – slowly.

A little note to self to round up this section: I have had so few responses to my own Facebook messages trying to talk about the urgency of the crisis that I have had to face up to the fact that I’m not practising Duncombe’s advice myself. In moments of exasperation, I want to scream, “Does it all have to be fun fun fun?!” Maybe, in a certain fashion, it does.

Telling stories

It isn’t only children who like a good story.

It has become commonplace in the field to assert that stories are the way forward. Stories are what engage people’s imaginations. According to some thinkers, stories are all there is. But personally, I have found it difficult to know what people mean by expressions such as ‘changing the narrative’ or ‘telling a story about climate change’. Do these people literally mean a story with a beginning, middle and an end or do they just mean a more descriptive sort of messaging?[8]

Two examples from the writing in this field follow. Bushell, Workman and Colley propose that a ‘narrative’ approach would enable governments to better put across strategies that might otherwise seem dull and uninteresting. Ganz seems to present stories from a rhetorical point of view, using them to inspire hope.

Perhaps more simple than either of these is the gradualist proposal that climate communicators make the realities of global warming seem more vivid by describing its impacts on ordinary people around the world, both the horror stories and the success stories – ‘stories’ here meaning something more like news reports.

But to encourage and empower people to make changes on the ground, should we be emphasising the success stories? Should we even be making up success stories about the future? Jonathan Porritt’s admirable attempt to present a blueprint for change in the form of a future-based character, Alex McKay, looking back and describing ‘The World We Made”  completely failed to engage this reader.[9] When I said this to philosopher Grace Lockrobin, she suggested the problem might have been that it was ‘bloodless’. Human beings don’t want anodyne morality tales; they want to engage with the darker sides of life. Fairy tales are full of danger and horror. The whole point of an interesting story is that somebody triumphs in the face of adversity.

In support of Grace’s view, my recent experience of reading a novel which made the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change shockingly vivid heightened my own motivation to do something to prevent them.[10] And nothing has had more impact on me than hearing first-hand, at COP21 in 2015, the story of a young African man telling how successive years of drought in his village had led him and his friend to undertake the risky journey to Britain to look for work (yes, they were ‘economic migrants’) and his friend not making it, killed on the way.

I return to the need for climate communicators to be responsive to their audiences and skilful in judging what types of story to tell when. (See also the appendix to my post about when fear-based appeals work and don’t work: Emergency mobilisation’: the heated debate about the harnessing of uncomfortable feelings – and some possible solutions.)

Creating and promoting ‘strategic narratives’

‘Towards a unifying narrative for climate change’ by Simon Bushell, Mark Workman and Thomas Colley is, I think, is a very useful paper for grassroots practitioners to read, not least because it provides a summary of climate communications up to that date (2016.) (In the notes below, my own comments are in brackets.)[11]

The paper summarises ‘gradualist’ thinking on climate communications[3] and to some extent acknowledges the point about the limits to human rationality made by Duncombe. It focuses on the question of how to address the ‘action gap’, whereby people express concern about the climate emergency but do nothing about it. The writers call for ‘strategic narratives’, especially from government. Firstly, the government has to have a credible strategy; secondly it needs to communicate this through a set of persuasive narratives. (I’m including this idea here because it might help shape your group’s  strategy too.)

The writers assert that it is time for a wide range of stakeholders to come together and begin an iterative process of narrative forming through constructive dialogue. This process should engage as many relevant stakeholders as possible. The outcome should be a short, digestible and persuasive set of narratives that are then propagated by those stakeholders. (I am not able to say whether this proposal has been tested out in practice or not.)

The process of developing strategic narratives would, itself, play an important role in unifying existing approaches, philosophies and attitudes to climate change into a cohesive and effective message, the writers claim.

Whereas Duncombe focuses on spectacle, Bushell et al focus on story. Telling stories is an essential human activity. Each of us constructs and lives a narrative; we need such a narrative to maintain our sense of identity. Narratives are a way of connecting and giving meaning to events and actions which would otherwise not obviously be connected.

Strategic climate narratives should build on classical story structure. They should:

1.   explain the situation

2.   define the problem that is disrupting the order of the initial situation

3.   then provide a resolution to that problem, a re-establishing of order.

In the case of climate change, they say, the ‘new order’ would close the gap between climate policy and action.

Bushell et al think the process of narrative creation needs to be collaborative. Narratives are not messages that get ‘delivered’, they are social products the only exist through a collective and continuous reconstruction and retelling processed by the audience. A narrative can only be promoted; how it will be appropriated and interpreted by the audience is something the narrator can only influence, not control. (This suggests that narrative workshops will be needed, as well as presentations of already developed narratives. Clearly the arts could play a helpful role here.)

A good strategic narrative should convert us from ‘othering’ to ‘owning’ the problem, increasing our feeling of self efficacy. It should link a positive vision of the future with the individual actions of members of its own societies and members of other societies whom it wishes to influence. It should promote new social norms.

‘Towards a unifying narrative for climate change’ is primarily directed at policymakers because Bushell et al assert the centrality of government in bringing about the necessary changes. This means that an important communication ambition for climate campaigners is to influence politicians and civil servants. 

In designing your communications strategy, your group may want to think in terms not only of different audiences within the community, but also local and national political leaders.

Personally, I find much that is interesting in this paper but I remain unclear about what the strategic narratives would actually be like. A core question is who is designing the strategy?  If government is doing that, how collaborative can we really expect them to be? In the end, won’t they be handing it down to the general public? I would love to see a nationwide programme of citizens assemblies, all feeding in to the design of the national strategy. Gordon Brown has called for this several times but it would be a huge change in political practice.

At the local level, however, we could combine this suggestion with Duncombe’s, recognising that what they have in common is the idea of engaging members of the public in envisaging future scenarios, drawing on a range of creative resources. At the time of writing, I have been very taken by the novel, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. It is the first book which has drawn me imaginatively into the kinds of problems and the potential solutions that people might be exploring in 30 years time, i.e. within the lifetimes of many alive now. Going back to the classical story structure described above, I think it would be important in any narrative development workshop to not only explore stories of climate impact that are already happening, but also to explore stories of what might be happening in 10, 20 or 30 years time, before beginning to grapple with ideas for solutions.[12]

The question of Utopias hovers over all social change campaigns. Emily Lewis of South Yorkshire Climate Alliance has pointed me to a text by Chris Carlsson and Francesca Manning called ‘Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus?’ which envisages collaborative ‘nowtopian’ communities ‘withdrawing from capitalist culture’ in a sustainable future. In contrast, Jenny Odell, in a recent book, questions the feasibility and the desirability of withdrawing from mainstream society, even though she accepts that the current culture in the developed world is unsustainable and arguably inhumane in its monetisation of our attention.[13]

Odell wonders how ‘third spaces’ can be found or carved out even in the midst of capitalist society – spaces or ways of being in which we can reconnect with and replenish our essential value, rather than our value for the profit making system. Emily Lewis points to some practical versions of this ideal already in place in South Yorkshire: “Organisations such as Regather, ShefFood and Food Works are building sustainable and resilient food systems. So, essentially, part of the storytelling process is showing that these visions can be achieved now, and that the barriers are more structural e.g. lack of funding. But that doesn’t mean people can’t get involved now, so that is the message we want to put out through the Can Do South Yorkshire website, giving people very clear and tangible actions they can take through different settings.”

Many community-based environmental organisations are already modelling practical ways forward; we saw in earlier blogs that it is very important for climate communicators to counteract the problem of remoteness by emphasising local relevance and local agency, in the here and now.

But climate awareness programmes can also can be framed as an exercise in futurology, asking citizens what they want for the future, not only in terms of their material surroundings but also the quality of their lives, what gives their existences meaning. This is why Grace Lockrobin and her fellow community philosophers are developing events and programmes to support citizens to reflect on the multi-layered implications of the climate and ecological emergencies and their possible solutions. Once again, we see that the frames overlap.[4]

Marshall Ganz on why stories matter in the art and craft of social change[14]

Marshall Ganz is a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. The notes below are edited from a talk he gave to the Global Catholic Movement on December 18th, 2017.  I am just sharing them as they are, rather than analysing them. I would welcome comments. I’m aware that the question of hope is a central one, not only in terms of handling the climate and nature emergencies, but at the heart of all human endeavours. It is no coincidence that hope was a key word in President Obama’s first campaign – Ganz was one of his advisors. Rebecca Solnit has written about hope in relationship to the environment and Jane Goodall has also just produced a book about it.  We certainly need it – but as Greta Thunberg has warned, just hoping isn’t enough. We need an underlying stratum of hope on which to build determination and anticipation –  anticipation that the problems will be addressed,  that humanity will succeed.

To get there, however, I note that Ganz says we will need to develop and use certain skills: relationship-building, motivation, strategizing, and action.

Ganz says:

First figure out how to break through the inertia of habit to get people to pay attention. That may happen by urgency of need or it may happen by outrage i.e. the contradiction between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be.

The way to master urgency is to mobilize hope. Hope is what allows us to deal with problems creatively. But don’t just talk about hope and other values in abstractions. Talk about them in the language of stories because stories are what enable us to communicate these values to one another.

All stories have three parts: a plot, a protagonist, and a moral. What makes a plot a plot and  gets you interested? Tension. An anomaly. The unexpected. The uncertain and the unknown. A plot begins when the unknown intervenes. We all lean forward because we are familiar with the experience of having to confront the unknown and to make choices. Those moments are the moments in which we are most fully human, because those are the moments in which we have the most choice. While they are exhilarating moments, they are also scary moments because we might make the wrong choice. We are all infinitely curious in learning how to be agents of change, how to be people who make good choices under circumstances that are unexpected and unknown to us.

In a story, a challenge presents itself to the protagonist who then has a choice, and an outcome occurs. The outcome teaches a moral, but because the protagonist is a humanlike character, we are able to identify empathetically, and therefore we are able to feel, not just understand, what is going on.

A story communicates fear, hope, and anxiety, and because we can feel it, we get the moral not just as a concept, but as a teaching of our hearts.

We all have a story of self. What’s unique about each of us is not the categories we belong to; what’s unique to us is our own journey of learning to be a full human being, a faithful person. Those journeys have their challenges, their obstacles, their crises. We learn to overcome them, and because of that we have lessons to teach.

The second story is the story of us. That’s an answer to the question, Why are we called? What experiences and values do we share as a community that call us to what we are called to? What is it about our experience of faith, public life, the pain of the world, and the hopefulness of the world? It’s putting what we share into words, to create a story of us.

Finally, there’s the story of now. The story of now is realizing, after the sharing of values and aspirations, that the world out there is not as it ought to be. We need to appreciate the challenge and the conflict between the values by which we wish the world lived and the values by which it actually does. The difference between those two forces upon us consideration of a choice. What do we do about that? We’re called to answer that question in a spirit of hope.

Our goal is to seize this hope, and turn it into concrete action. After developing our stories of self, then we work on building relationships, which forms the story of us. From there we turn to strategizing and action, working together to achieve a common purpose, learning to experience hope—that’s the story of now.

Organizing is about mobilizing power. We cannot turn our love into justice without engaging power; all three are needed.

Communities get organized because there are people among them who are skilled organizers and leaders. Leadership is about enabling others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty, mobilizing the resources of a constituency and turning them into goals consistent with that constituency’s values.

We start with the skill of relationship-building, the story of self. Then we develop the skill of motivation or the story of us. Third, the skill of strategizing, the story of now. And fourth, the skill of action.

Learning organizing skills is like learning how to ride a bicycle. You can read 10 books about it but how do you really start learning to ride a bicycle? You get on. And you fall. That’s how you learn. That’s how you learn organizing too.

(An interesting contrast to Ganz’s approach is the community organising approach described in my post Politicisation: how can climate communicators help people move into campaigning? in which anger is seen as a crucial motivating force for change.)

Summary of key points

  • Scientific presentations can be dull or off-putting so learn how to generate people’s interest.
  • Draw on the power of visuals, of music, of stories, of drama, etc. to reach into people’s emotions, engage their imaginations and engage them with ethical dilemmas.
  • Consider working with arts practitioners skilled in community and education work.
  • Street theatre can be powerful but remember the importance of building rapport, give attention to thinking about how you come over, be warm and open and produce skilful performances.
  • Working class audiences tend to prefer shows that display directness, comedy, music, emotion, variety, moment-by-moment effect, immediacy and localism.
  • It can be more effective if people from the community create the performance themselves.
  • Understand people’s dreams  and work collaboratively with them to explore ways to achieve them.
  • Find ways to appeal to spectacle and myth.
  • Progressive spectacles should be participatory and open-ended, setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers.
  • Think in terms of co-production or a video-game in which the player is a genuine participant.
  • Literature and other arts can enable people to engage in a deeper way with the complex, existential nature of the climate and nature crises.
  • Stories are what engage people’s imaginations, so use them to put across strategies that might otherwise seem dull and uninteresting, and to inspire hope.
  • Describe the impacts of global heating on ordinary people around the world, both the horror stories and the success stories – be  skilful in judging what type of story to tell when.
  • Consider telling success stories about the future but remember that human beings don’t want anodyne morality tales; they want to see somebody triumph in the face of adversity.
  • Counteract the problem of remoteness by emphasising local relevance and local agency, in the here and now.
  • Think in terms not only of different audiences within the community, but also local and national political leaders.
  • To create a new regional or national ‘strategic’ story of hope, bring a wide range of stakeholders together to begin an iterative process of narrative forming through constructive dialogue.
  • A good strategic narrative should increase our feeling of self efficacy, linking a positive vision of the future with individual actions and promoting new social norms.
  • Develop events and programmes to support citizens to reflect on the multi-layered implications of the climate and nature emergencies.
  • Carve out spaces in which people can reconnect with their essential value, rather than their value for the profit making system.
  • Engage members of the public in envisaging future scenarios, drawing on a range of creative resources.
  • Explore stories of what might be happening in 10, 20 or 30 years time, before beginning to grapple with ideas for solutions.
  • Show that these solutions can be achieved and that the barriers are largely structural e.g. lack of funding.
  • Mobilise hope – use a foundation of hope to build anticipation that the problems will be addressed, that humanity will succeed.
  • Learn how to engage with the story of each individual self, the story of us as a group or community, and the story of now – working together to achieve a common purpose.
  • Communities need skilled organisers and leaders who know how to enable others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty.
  • Develop and use the skills of relationship-building, motivation, strategising, and action.
  • Organising is about mobilizing power. We cannot turn our love into justice without engaging power.
  • Learning organising skills is like learning how to ride a bicycle: just get on and try it.

Notes


[1] Comment by Stuart Capstick at webinar Beyond optimism or doom: How can we communicate the need for urgent climate action? XR Scientists webinar April 7th 2021.

[2] Maslin, Mark. (2004)  Global Warming, A Very Short Introduction. OUP, Oxford.

[3] Declaration of interest: I was the Director of Creative Partnerships Sheffield from 2005-2009.

[4] Nutter, Ruth. (2020). Paradise Is Here, Building Community Around Things That Matter. Sheffield. Guild of St. George.

[5] A compendious resource of ideas relating to sustainability is ‘Playing for Time’ by Lucy Neal (Oberon Books, 2015)

[6] Duncombe, Stephen. (2007.) Dream – Re-Imagining Progressive Politics In An Age Of Fantasy. New York. The New Press. See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/253775.Dream

[7] George Marshall has made a similar comment about evangelical churches. Rhetoric, song, emotion, community, hugs and hope can meet deep human longings.

[8] On the EdX website, the University of Michigan runs an online course on Storytelling for Social Change: https://www.edx.org/course/storytelling-for-social-change

[9] Porritt, Jonathan. (2013) The World we Made. Phaidon.

[10] Robinson, Kim Stanley. (2020) The Ministry for the Future. London. Orbit.

[11] ‘Towards a unifying narrative for climate change’ by Simon Bushell, Mark Workman and Thomas Colley. Briefing paper No. 18, published in April 2016. The Grantham Institute at Imperial College. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/grantham-institute/public/publications/briefing-papers/Towards-a-unifying-narrative-for-climate-change-Grantham-BP18.pdf

[12] Personal communication.

[13] Odell, Jenny. (2019) How to Do Nothing / Resisting the Attention Economy. London. Melville House.

[14] This is an edited version of an article adapted from Ganz’s presentation at Sojourners’ Training for Change conference in June 2008. The full article can be found here: https://catholicclimatemovement.global/marshall-ganz-on-why-stories-matter-in-the-art-and-craft-of-social-change/ His podcast, Faces of Change with Marshall Ganz, can be found at: https://commonslibrary.org/faces-of-change-podcast-by-marshall-ganz/


[1] For an explanation of ‘disavowal’ see the second blog in this series:Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators

[2] The Creative Partnerships programme was funded under the New Labour government to explore creative ways to improve teaching and learning in schools.

[3] “Gradualist’ thinking favours a gently-gently approach to climate communications, trying to draw people in without scaring them.

[4] The third blog in this series describes a range of ‘frames’ or ‘lenses’ through which different practitioners have seen/approached climate communications.

Politicisation: how can climate communicators help people move into campaigning?

This is one of a series of posts entitled Principles and Advice for Grassroots Climate Communicators, in which I share and reflect on a range of ideas within the field, with a view to helping grassroots activists and groups communicate effectively. For an overview of approaches and challenges in the field, please see my post Climate Communications – An Overview. A summary of the practical suggestions made in this post can be found at the bottom.

In my second post in this series, Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators, I suggested that you could think of engaging with an individual in terms of a ladder, from first attracting their interest, through to ‘politicising’ them, i.e. stimulating or supporting them to become active in seeking to influence the powers that be, perhaps by joining a party or campaigning group.

This is the most speculative of these posts because, despite some involvement in environmental politics over many years, I cannot claim any expertise in how to politicise people. The nearest I came was planning and facilitating a workshop for my local Green Party where I supported party members to rethink their approach to the engagement and motivation of new members, following at that time a surge of interest. I’m afraid to say that, despite some very interesting discussions on the day, the pressures of local election campaigning soon took precedence again, the more innovative ideas were not taken up and the surge of interest faded. So this post is more informed by my awareness of the pitfalls than by expertise in how to surmount them. However, I do offer a few touchstones from the literature that may be helpful in thinking about campaign-oriented communications and I was very lucky to be able to interview one senior figure in the field.

It is worth saying that the context of writing this post is that my local campaigning group, South Yorkshire Climate Alliance (SCA) has succeeded in raising funding for community-based climate awareness projects. This development has raised the question for us: what is the relationship between campaigning (seeking to influence politicians and the public to achieve policy commitments towards sustainability) and engagement and education? To answer this question, I would refer you back to the first post in the series, Climate Communications – An Overview, and the importance of aligning your communications objectives with the wider objectives of your project.

The seduction approach

One approach to encouraging political action by previously unengaged members of the community could be described as seduction: offering them enjoyable, relevant, local activities, gradually feeding in political insights and drawing them into action through a ladder of engagement, starting with very simple things people can do, which don’t take up too much time. This approach aims at recruitment. Political parties and campaign groups occasionally have induction programmes taking this kind of approach.

But my experience is that the pressures of day-to-day politics (on top of people’s day-to-day pressures) and the culture of earnestness within many local parties and groups prevent such programmes being set up or maintained. It is only too common that interested people arrive at their first meeting, are barely greeted, are rapidly thrown into an arcane and intense ‘business’ meeting and never get a chance to talk about why they came. Unsurprisingly, only the most committed who feel comfortable in this kind of culture come back. So, if your group is to engage members of the community successfully, it must apply some emotional intelligence and consider seriously what it means to be (a) welcoming and (b) encouraging.

The principles and practical ideas outlined in Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators include a wide range of suggestions, from how to make early contacts welcoming through to this challenge of politicisation. It may be useful to think in terms of a ladder of engagement, such as I outline there. When people first approach a campaigning group, it is because they have begun to be concerned about the issue, or having been concerned about the issue for some time, something has happened to galvanise them into wanting to do something about it. So when they first make contact, they want to talk about their reasons are doing so. Isn’t that obvious? But how often do established groups make time and space for new people to talk?

They may also want to air questions and doubts, and concerns about their capacity. They may want to go slowly; they may be fearful about being drawn into something they don’t really know a lot about or which looks daunting. They may need time to build familiarity and trust with the people in your group.

On the other hand, they may come to that first meeting all fired up and ready to go.  What can I do? What can I do that will make a real difference? What can I do tomorrow?

Established members of the group need to be sensitive to where each particular person is at, and ideally to have appropriate suggestions that they will be keen to take up.

The standard advice is to have at hand a range of options, from the simplest, quickest and least demanding through to something that sounds significant and exciting.  One person  may only go so far as to sign a petition; another may be ready to join in a non-violent direct action in the city centre. Your communications should reflect these options. Stephen Duncombe[1] recommends that you ‘layer’ your message: Start with simple, eye-catching headlines, and signpost to more complex levels of information and analysis: 5-second read, 60-second read, 10-minute read, 30–60-minute read. (I think I could improve on my own practice here.)

In a similar way, as climate communicators, we need to develop the skill of helping people to ‘raise their game’. We come back to our central challenge – how to move skilfully between encouraging and motivating people (giving them an increased sense of ‘agency’) and confronting them with the ’urgency’ of the situation, galvanising them to act decisively. (I discuss this challenge in more depth in my post ‘Emergency mobilisation’: the heated debate about the harnessing of uncomfortable feelings – and some possible solutions.)

If we do nothing else, we should bear in mind the call made by Margaret Klein Salamon amongst others – to make everyone we talk to aware of the need for systemic change. While it is good to help people to think about their own carbon footprints, about practical things they can do that will help them feel they are contributing usefully, we need to be aware that it appears to be a tactic of the fossil fuel industry to direct the spotlight at individual behaviour change, to shift attention away from what they are doing. All discussions about decarbonising activities and projects should therefore encourage people to take political action, if only at the level of showing them how to write an email to their MP.

In terms of drawing new people into a more political way of thinking, the anthropologist Veronica Barassi makes interesting points about the impact of social media on political activism. (I came across these ideas in a book by Jenny Odell.)[2] Barassi says that the immediacy of social media closes down the time needed for ‘political elaboration’. Because the content that activists share online has to be ‘catchy’, “activists do not have the space and time to articulate their political reflections.” Barassi also suggests that networks built on social media “are often based on a common reaction/emotion and not on a shared political project and neither on a shared understanding of social conflict.” Strong ties and well-defined political projects, she says, still come from “action on the ground… face-to-face interaction, discussion, deliberation and confrontation.” Odell draws out from Barassi’s analysis that thought and deliberation require space and time both for individual ‘incubation’ and for dialogue with others.

I note too Barassi’s emphasis on a shared understanding of your political objectives and chosen methods. These are things that can be explained to new people but, please, without browbeating them!  I speak from experience; the heavy-handed lecturing and interrogating that I experienced as a young man from a representative of a far left party switched me off mainstream political campaigning for many years. What I think I would have appreciated – and others may appreciate at the present time – would have been thoughtful explanation of the values, beliefs and priorities of different political affiliations or ideologies and why you have chosen your own affiliation or ideology. That’s what I’d call basic ‘political education’, alongside explanation of political practices and strategies on the ground. I assume that, if you studied politics at school, the teacher would present such information in an reasonably impartial way. Unfortunately, most activists are so tribal they aren’t willing to explain these things, so anyone who approaches them is presented with a de-facto ultimatum: “either accept our ideology wholesale and join our tribe or you’re not welcome here.” That’s not my approach; I place a lot of importance on promoting critical thinking and encouraging people to think things through for themselves – even if they conclude they have different beliefs to me.

Inclusivity

We live in a time when many white people seem finally to have become galvanised around the enduring injustice of racism and the rights and needs of minorities are being debated perhaps as never before. This is a huge topic that I’m not going to dig into here but I would refer you back briefly to the concept of rapport, described in Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators. You can build rapport by interacting in a warm, respectful and genuine way – or you can have it simply by the fact of sharing common characteristics. But in many community groups, some social types dominate the membership – exactly because human beings are attracted to and feel comfortable in groups of people who ‘get’ their way of being.

If you turn up at a meeting or event about the climate and nature emergencies and you can see straightaway that you are the only black person in the room, or one of the few women or young people, or one of the few people with a regional accent, or some other characteristic, you need to have a certain self-confidence to navigate the situation. A warm and respectful welcome is probably all that is needed to help you feel more at ease, along with sensitivity to the points made above. But to go deeper, activists who are more aligned with a historical ‘oppressor’ group would be well advised to attend some training on unconscious bias, giving them supportive time and space to reflect on their own backgrounds and how they formed their values and beliefs – including unaware prejudices. Then there is less chance of them putting their foot in it when welcoming new colleagues.

The community organising approach

Rather than trying to seduce people into becoming more politically engaged, the community organising approach starts directly from political questions. Matthew Bolton describes the approach in his book ‘How to Resist, Turn Protest To Power’.[3] You start by asking people what makes them angry, he says. You encourage them to tell each other stories about how particular problems have affected them. You support them to develop ideas for actions that they want to take (you don’t try to impose your ideas.) You facilitate their discussions, helping them break down the big problems into specific issues, identifying who the decision makers are and who has the power to make the changes they need. Then, together, you ‘take action to get a reaction’. You provoke the decision makers. If they don’t agree to implement the changes you ask for, you escalate the action with ever more creative tactics, learning as you go and celebrating the small wins as you build incrementally up to the bigger issue. In this process of relevant, meaningful, practical action, people learn team work, they build solidarity and they reach for real political power.

A core concept of the community organising approach is ‘self interest’, which can seem contradictory to activists whose motivation is altruism. Community organising asserts that self interest is a realistic starting point. By self interest they mean:

  • appreciating our own needs and motivations
  • appreciating the self interest of others
  • recognising that people are motivated to get involved by the things they care deeply about.

The implication here is that most people will not be drawn into activism by stories of people suffering thousands of miles away. They need to start from where they are at. And where they are at may not align neatly with the priorities of your local climate awareness programme. You may want them to think about reducing their car use but they may be more concerned about bullying at the local playground, for example. Bolton says you should start where they are at but how does that fit with meeting the objectives of your organisation and your funders? This is definitely something to think about.

It would be interesting to discuss whether the community organising approach is at all relevant to better off sections of the population. Self-interest for them may mean thinking about their investments, their pensions, their homes, etc. and they may be able to effect changes in those contexts. Whatever the class background, messages which seem to imply that people’s material interests will be badly affected are likely to be problematic – unless, perhaps, they have become convinced that this is a national, World War II type emergency and we genuinely are all in it together – and at the time of writing (just prior to COP 26, October 2021) we haven’t got there yet.

I note that Bill Gates, writing as an industrialist in his book How To Avoid A Climate Disaster[4], warns that sustainable technologies will not be taken up if the “climate premium” (the extra cost)  is too high. Idealists like me might like to think otherwise but when I ran this by one of my climate conversations groups (a family) they just thought Gates was completely right. People aren’t going to go for sustainable solutions if they are more expensive, they said. And that included them!

So the community organising approach, with its emphasis on people’s self interest and immediate concerns, can be challenging when it comes to encouraging climate activism. The culture maybe shifting now but only recently activists going into less well off areas here where I live found that people were not raising the climate as one of their main concerns.  Many people have enough pressures to deal with day-to-day without trying to grapple with enormous, complex, global problems, especially people living in more straitened circumstances. Bolton’s solution is to propose actions that will have a material benefit for people in that community. Rather than trying to educate them about climate politics, for example, you would be better off with a specific practical goal, such as encouraging them to switch to a renewable energy provider or supporting them to seek funds for better insulation that will save them money.

Engaging and training up the strategic leaders of the future

In an interview in 2014, Keith Allott, Director (Power Transition), European Climate Foundation, gave me his analysis of the priorities for climate campaigning, as he then saw them from his position as a prominent climate strategist. He placed his central focus on the transition to renewable energy. He said that we need both grassroots and political action but he emphasised the importance of getting the right people into government, which means training young people now.

Like both Bolton and Barassi above, Allott thought that many young activists and politics students needed to develop a better theory of power or change. In developing that theory – and a realistic strategy – young campaigners need to be helped to develop an analysis of the social context. We live, he said, in a society that is:

  • infantilised (e.g. celebrity culture)
  • fragmented and individualised (e.g. loss of religions and unions)
  • characterised by a low pay and/or overwork culture, so people are worn out.

He questioned the two main activist approaches (aggressive demonstrations and personal lifestyle changes.) Individual lifestyle changes aren’t the priority, he said; that’s blaming individuals who have little or no control. Climate communications should emphasise the citizen role, he said. We should aim to empower people to know how to contribute to the big changes needed – and then ‘do their bit’ in behaviour change as a fun, communal, bonding,  guilt-free activity.

One approach to leadership development: Climate Reality Project

Former American Vice President, Al Gore, who has been very influential in making the general public take the climate crisis seriously, has focused his efforts in recent years on developing climate leadership skills in the community. He points out that the key lever for change is to persuade politicians to pass laws that will make sustainable practices obligatory. But we come up against the usual paradox in this field, that the politicians say they can only act when their constituents put pressure on them. So we need committed and skilled climate communicators at all levels of society, some working to build the widespread ‘social mandate’  that is going to be needed for the general population to support the necessary changes, others working more specifically to target and influence particular politicians. Gore’s Climate Reality Project runs training courses which aim to equip and inspire ordinary citizens to become effective climate communicators and campaigners. They say, on their website:

“Our signature activist program, the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, has trained over 36,000 change makers worldwide since 2006. The result is a global network of activists leading the fight for climate solutions through our 10 branch offices – Australia, Brazil, Canada, Europe, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, and South Africa and a partnership in China – and 140 chapters across the US.

We believe real change comes from the ground up. We know that a small-but-committed critical mass of activists can not only transform society, but change the world. That’s why we recruit, train, and mobilize people to become powerful activists, providing the skills, campaigns, and resources to push for aggressive climate action and high-level policies that accelerate a just transition to clean energy.

Alongside these efforts, our dynamic communications initiatives connect climate and behavioral science with the emotional power of compelling stories, raising awareness and inspiring action in online audiences everywhere.”[5]

(For more on this question of stories, see my blog in this series: Should the arts, creativity and especially stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning?)

All I know about the Climate Reality Project is what I’ve seen online and one conversation I had with one of their presenters at COP 21. I suspect that it serves up an exciting and inspiring cocktail of information, practical guidance and solidarity. I’m a little concerned that the approach may seem a bit American to some of us in the UK, especially older people, who have not been so good, historically, at embracing enthusiastic styles of communication, but I’m basing that on a very superficial impression. If I’m at all right, then it may be a matter of needing to adjust the approach to suit this particular culture.

My own recent experience of running a climate conversations course for university students here in the UK was very positive; the young people seemed to be longing for a space where they could not only talk about why they cared so much about the climate and nature emergencies but also learn skills in how to communicate their concern to family, friends, colleagues and general public. Several of them fed back that my invitation to reflect on their personal histories, values and motivations had been important to them. My experience is that, if you want to get people deeply engaged, you need to tune into their deeper emotions.

To conclude, I hope this post has stimulated some thoughts for you, if only to be frustrated with its skimpiness! If you are somebody who has a lot of experience in the field and who could share with others your knowledge of what works, I would be absolutely delighted to refer people to your own writing, to insert your comments here, or even to replace the whole post. The point of writing these posts is not just for me to mull over things I’ve read, it’s to enable grassroots climate communicators to be as effective as they can be. You can contact me at: nuttgensclimate@outlook.com.

Summary

The suggestions covered in this post include:

  • be clear about the differences between campaigning and engagement/education, between organisational meetings and induction meetings
  • make time and space for new people to talk, build trust and develop a shared understanding of your political objectives and methods
  • build rapport with new people by interacting in a warm, respectful and genuine way
  • have at hand a range of options for them, from ‘soft’ to ‘full on’
  • activists more aligned with a historical ‘oppressor’ group would be well advised to attend unconscious bias training
  • explain how people can contribute to the big changes needed, bearing in mind that the key lever for change is to persuade politicians to pass laws that will make sustainable practices obligatory
  • consider appealing to people’s self interest, highlighting the material benefits of sustainability
  • develop skill in helping them to ‘raise their game’
  • avoid guilt-tripping and approach lifestyle change as a fun, communal, bonding activity
  • consider how you might train up the strategic leaders of the future, helping young activists to develop a sound theory of power and change
  • to get people deeply engaged, tune into their deeper emotions

Notes

[1] Duncombe, Stephen. (2007.) Dream – Re-Imagining Progressive Politics In An Age Of Fantasy. New York. The New Press. See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/253775.Dream

[2] Quoted and summarised in Odell, Jenny (2019). How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy. New York, Melville House Publishing. Pages 164-165.

[3] Bolton, Matthew. (2018.) How to Resist: Turn Protest to Power. London. Bloomsbury Publishing. See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35668862-how-to-resist

[4] Gates, Bill. (2021) How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need. Penguin Random House UK.

[5] https://www.climaterealityproject.org/our-mission

‘Emergency mobilisation’: the heated debate about the harnessing of uncomfortable feelings – and some possible solutions

This is one of a series of blogs entitled Principles and Advice for Grassroots Climate Communicators, in which I share and reflect on a range of ideas within the field, with a view to helping grassroots activists and groups communicate effectively. For an overview of approaches and challenges in the field, please see my post Climate Communications – An Overview.

I have given space to examining this debate in some detail here because it is so live. Readers with limited time could jump to the section near the end which suggests some win-win communication strategies (‘Balancing urgency and agency in practice’.) A summary of key points can be found at the bottom, where you will also find an appendix about the pros and cons of appealing to people’s fears.

In contrast to the ‘gradualist’ approach, the Climate Mobilisation movement emphasises the urgency and danger of the climate and ecological emergencies. One of its leading spokespersons, Margaret Klein Salamon, emphasises the systemic nature of the problem and calls for a “World War II scale transformation of the economy and society.” Like Extinction Rebellion, she asserts that the starting point must be to face the truth that this really is an emergency. The question is not whether you are ‘ready’ to face it or whether you can ‘handle’ it;  the question is whether you would rather protect yourself from painful knowledge or protect the entire human family from impending catastrophe. She quotes David Wallace Wells (“It’s worse, much worse, than you think”[1]) and criticises many climate commentators for creating an unrealistically optimistic picture. Even the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) demonstrates a systemic bias towards understatement, she says. But on top of that, the fossil fuel industry has carried out an extended disinformation campaign – and is still doing so despite its increasingly green rhetoric.

Salamon is a psychologist and she offers a psychological analysis. The denial campaign has been successful because it aligns with our desires and defences – intellectualisation, wilful ignorance, wishful thinking, etc. She criticises the dominant gradualist view that “we must not scare the public; they cannot handle it”. She attributes this belief to a cultural “fear of fear”.

A key premise invoked for her urgency is the anticipation of tipping points in nature if we don’t decarbonise quickly; she calls for a 10 year timeline and says 2050 is far too late.[2] She points to alarming trends which suggest that “on our current trajectory, we are facing civilisation’s collapse.”

Salamon asserts that citizens’ feelings of powerlessness have been fostered by neo-liberal ideology and are unwarranted. Groups of concerned citizens have changed the world many times before and they have done it through the power of truth (a recent example being the #Me Too movement.) However, along with other psychologically-based commentators such as Rosemary Randall, Sally Weintrobe and Joanna Macy, she thinks that human beings do not find it easy to face up to painful realities; facing climate truth requires personal transformation. We need to face our feelings, especially fear and grief, before we can move on. We should not see fear or grief as an insurmountable barrier; emotions are not static, people can move through them.

Having faced up to our painful feelings, we need as individuals to reimagine our life story, to change our plans and expectations. But we also need a collective awakening, on the scale of a response to national attack, such as happened to the USA at Pearl Harbor. We need to enter into ‘emergency mode’, channelling our fear to fight the threat facing us collectively and creatively. “This is the opposite of panic mode, in which we either freeze or take flight,” she says. When a society enters emergency mode, it mobilises and works collectively to address and solve huge problems quickly – as the USA and other countries did during World War II. Individuals and groups enter emergency mode when they accept the reality of a life -threatening emergency and reorient their hierarchy of priorities, deploying all available resources to solve the crisis and seeking personal gratification through engagement with the emergency.

What does all this mean for grass roots communications? In complete contrast to the ‘gradualist’ commentators, Salamon advocates: “Start by telling the truth, loudly and all the time. This is the one mode of engagement that I recommend for everyone.”

She points out that, despite increases in general awareness, a 2019 study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that only 8% of Americans talk about climate change at least once a week, and only 15% once a month. In other words, the gradualist approach seemed to be failing as much as the earlier scientific approach. I think her challenge deserves serious attention; we know that disavowal means that we are all to some extent hiding from the pain of facing up to the difficulties here. Gradualists surely have to acknowledge that it wasn’t a gently-gently approach that finally grabbed the world’s attention; it was the publicity-grabbing civil disobedience of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future. If these activists hadn’t been brave and bold, it is doubtful whether politicians of all parties would be taking so much interest now. On the other hand, such people do tend to emerge into prominence when the time is right; no doubt the persistent chipping away by campaigners, researchers, committed politicians and gradualist climate communicators had helped to create public readiness.

It seems that Salamon has, to some extent, rowed back from advocating blaring emergency sirens on every street corner. She now advocates a similar strategy to Climate Outreach – generating masses of climate conversations at ground level, starting with family and friends and expanding from there. But there is a difference in tone. Unlike Salamon, The #Talking Climate Handbook produced by Climate Outreach recommends having conversations characterised by listening, not telling.[3] Both parties agree that sharing your own perspective authentically can be powerful but Salamon emphasises that the conversation may not be comfortable. Prepare yourself, she says, for your role as “a loud and talkative truth teller.” She invites us all to become ‘climate warriors’.

In calling for widespread climate conversations, Salamon’s aim is to make people aware of the need for systemic change. It is good to help people to think about their own carbon footprints, but she claims that it is a tactic of the fossil fuel industry to shift the focus onto individual behaviour change when the truth is that systemic change is needed. All discussions about decarbonising activities and projects should therefore encourage people to take political action as well.

The gradualist riposte to Salamon’s position is the long-standing experience of disavowal so often manifest to climate campaigners. As an example, the other day, I asked friends on Facebook why I received so few comments on my climate change posts. Only two people replied! But one of those comments was particularly revealing: “I keep reading [your posts] but not following up for some odd reason. Partly my brain is like a bumble bee at the moment. Oddly I feel like I am not enough of an activist and also possibly too old (i.e. the cause) of things so I start already feeling a bit odd.” This honest comment exemplifies the complicated emotions that climate communications can trigger and how quickly issues of identity and agency can arise – issues that probably need to be explored supportively over time before this person will feel able to commit herself to something like emergency mode.

Beyond optimism or doom: How can we communicate the need for urgent climate action?’

The tensions between the gradualist approach and the emergency mobilisation approach were explored in webinar organised by Scientists for XR on April 7th, 2021. Titled ‘Beyond optimism or doom: How can we communicate the need for urgent climate action?’, the webinar was chaired by Dr Emily Grossman, science communicator, broadcaster and educator. The eminent panellists were:

  • Stuart Capstick, Research Fellow, School of Psychology, University of Cardiff, Deputy Director for the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation (CAST).[4]
  • Margaret Klein Salamon, founder of The Climate Mobilization Project, Program Director of Climate Awakening and author of Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself with Climate Truth.
  • Michael E. Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University, a lead author of IPCC reports and author of The New Climate War.
  • Rosemary Randall, psychotherapist (retired), co-creator of the Carbon Conversations project and author/co-author of In Time for Tomorrow? the Carbon Conversations Handbook and ‘A New Climate for Psychotherapy?’, an exploration of resistance to action on climate change.

In the event, there appeared to have been a rapprochement between the two most historically opposed panellists, Salamon and Mann. Mann, in his recent book and elsewhere, has been loudly critical of what he calls the “doomist” approach, premised on the prediction of imminent, catastrophic tipping points, promulgated by people like Margaret Klein Salamon, David Wallace Wells and Rupert Read of Extinction Rebellion. He agrees that disasters caused by global warming are already happening around the world but asserts that action is still possible to prevent things getting even worse. He says climate modelling is now more sophisticated and realistic, and science is on the side of hope. Surface temperatures usually plateau quickly and oceans draw CO2 down from the atmosphere, so there will be an immediate impact as soon as we start to bring carbon emissions down. Science doesn’t support the idea of runaway warming, he says,and the doomist approach serves only to promote hopelessness, rather than motivation.

Mann and Salamon came together on the call for a World War II style emergency mobilisation and Salamon appeared to have moved towards Mann in accepting his core proposition that, in climate communications, ‘urgency must always be balanced with agency. In other words, people do need to know how serious the situation is but they also need to know what they can do about it.[5]

Presenting both the ‘good news’ and the ‘bad news’

In practice, this is a tricky balance to achieve, requiring considerable skill and great flexibility from the climate communicator. In the Climate Conversations course that I ran for students at University of Sheffield in December 2020, I worried about how to present the ‘good news’ versus the ‘bad news’. My own feeling in retrospect was that I had erred too much on the side of reassuring people, that I had not communicated the urgency sufficiently, and some participants agreed with me. But then I received comments in the final feedback to the effect that I had not adequately dealt with the ‘eco-anxiety’ provoked by the course!

What strategy then should Can Do South Yorkshire and similar community-based projects adopt? Below I suggest some possible win-win approaches. Before leaving this debate, however, I offer some thoughts for further consideration by anyone interested. I would welcome feedback:

  • Scientific understanding. The debate is based on different understandings of the science – the emerging evidence, the climate modelling and the predictions. The complications of presenting the science accurately to the general public cannot be entirely sidestepped. However, in seeking to evaluate different points of view, it is worth noting who has the more relevant expertise. A PhD in Atmospheric Science is more relevant than one in Philosophy, for example.
  • Confirmation bias. Parties on all sides are prone to confirmation bias, i.e. they will seek out and notice evidence that supports their existing position. Even when the evidence is weighed up rationally by academics, predispositions may colour the conclusions drawn. A person’s attitude to risk is one example of such a predisposition. The only solution I can see here is to keep seeking constructive, critical dialogue, based on seeking to understand the other person’s point of view.
  • Worst case scenarios. The prominent ‘doomist’ writers that Mann refers to, e.g. David Wallace Wells and the Jem Bendell (the Deep Adaptation movement), are focusing on worst-case scenarios. They say it is unwise to assume that even if the most likely scenario in the bell curve is the medium-case, that that will be the one that will in fact happen. Their premise is that a wise strategy would be to prevent the worst-case scenario. One possibility therefore is that climate communicators should help people to reflect on the full range of possible scenarios, assess the risks attached to each and consider possible preventatives and solutions. Whilst I realise that this is a highly rational approach, something like it may be more accessible to many members of the public than the emotion-based approach (although emotional sensitivity would be required to handle the discussion well.)
  • Tricky questions of choice. I recall that David MacKay and Mark Lynas came to the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield several years ago with an interactive road show that confronted the audience with difficult questions about renewable energy based in fact, not emotion or ideology. Many of the difficult facts that we need to confront are not of a directly psychological nature; they are technical, financial and logistical. The situation is imperfect, the atmosphere is already full of greenhouse gases, many of the solutions proposed have downsides, they all have costs[6] – there are difficult choices to make.
  • The danger of generalisations. I suspect that some unhelpful generalisations are being made on both sides of this debate. We need to remember that one size does not fit all; each person and each social group has their own history, beliefs, values, attitudes and circumstances. In planning a climate communication, we need to think about the target audience – what they know, what they don’t know, what their needs and interests are, what misunderstandings they might be prone to, what material challenges they are dealing with, how strong their sense of self efficacy is, etc.
  • Differing political strategies. In essence, this debate is about political strategy as much as science or psychology. My own belief is that, in working for social change and the establishment of new norms, one needs both the reformists and revolutionaries, both the behind-the-scenes, tactful tacticians and the out-front, in-your-face rebels. Here, locally, South Yorkshire’s Can Do programme will need to decide whether it is going to commit to one of those tactics or explore a mixture of the two. Different strategies may be appropriate when talking to civic and political leaders, as opposed to the general public.[7] Different strategies will be essential when talking to individuals or community groups, depending on who they are, what they know and how they are feeling. In other words, the watchword must be ‘flexibility.’

Balancing urgency and agency in practice

George Marshall from Climate Outreach offers one way to resolve the dilemma of communicating both urgency and agency. Where time allows, he says, “place negative information in a narrative arc that leads to a positive resolution.[8] Perhaps we can make a distinction between ‘fear messages’  and ‘truth messages’. It is important to tell people the truth about how serious the situation is but at the same time to give them hope, to empower them and show them convincingly what they can do to make a difference. Some other suggestions for practitioners:

  • Tell the truth but never take away hope.
  • Be a caring guide, taking people on an emotional journey from facing up to the gravity of the crisis to feeling empowered to do something effective about it.
  • Develop your skills in being such a guide – being sensitive to your audience’s feelings, using language appropriately, adopting the appropriate tone, judging when it’s the right time to go deep and when it’s time to change the subject and cheer everybody up.

At the time of writing, it seems that the next big challenge for us as climate communicators here in South Yorkshire is to become skilful in meeting people ‘where they are at’ (generally speaking, aware of the climate and nature emergencies but not yet taking much action about them) and then moving them up a notch to a higher degree of awareness and commitment. This may mean for some of us pushing through a British fear of conflict. I think, for many of us, it will mean becoming more conscious of our own agenda and the risk of sounding/being patronising. But it is a challenge that needs to be met; ducking out of it would be a sign that, as Salamon would say, we were still protecting a self-image rooted in disavowal of the deep seriousness of the emergency; we haven’t truly accepted yet that the world has changed and therefore we are going to have to change who we are. I fully admit that this includes me.

Developing this skill is a matter for further practice. I hope to be able to update this post in a few months’ time. Meanwhile, I would welcome any links to practitioners and organisations who are already demonstrating these skills, from whom I could learn.

One possibly helpful framework that I will mention here is the Active Hope approach. While not everybody will want to attend the kind of emotion-based workshop it employs, its four-step process may be useful for us as climate communicators to bear in mind:

1.     appreciating what we love about our lives and the world;

2.     facing up to the facts of the climate emergency and how they make us feel;

3.     thinking freshly about what we can do and how we see ourselves;

4.     making practical plans for things we can realistically do (I have reworded the stages.)[9]

Prompts for the ‘good news’ and the ‘bad news’

Where time does not allow a long ‘narrative arc’, for example in a short conversation, my working position is to have in my mind, or at my fingertips, two different lists of facts – facts I think will be particularly persuasive that can be drawn on as appropriate to the person, group or situation:

  • good news’ facts that I think will raise people’s spirits, inspire them and give them hope
  • bad news’ facts that I think might make them sit up and listen, really understand that this is a crisis.

‘Good News’ facts (or reasons to be optimistic) might include:

  • Well-established technologies e.g. in renewable energy
  • Emerging technological solutions
  • ‘Big picture’ optimistic action plans, e.g. Zero Carbon Britain, Project Drawdown, etc.
  • Positive political developments, such as the embrace of sustainability as an aspiration across the political spectrum
  • The growing interest in sustainable economics, e.g. Doughnut Economics
  • Inspiring examples of local projects or groups achieving successes
  • Successful national and international campaigns such as divestment
  • Inspiring examples of people getting their message across to politicians e.g. Friday for Future and Extinction Rebellion

‘Bad News’ facts that one might want to draw people’s attention to – to counteract complacency – might include:

  • Changes in the natural environment already happening locally and across the UK e.g. milder winters, hotter summers, floods, loss of birds and insects.
  • The breaking of records for global temperatures over the last 10 years
  • The loss of ice mass in Greenland over the same period of time
  • The percentage of the world’s animal and plant species now at risk of extinction
  • The IPCC report on the drastic differences between 1.5° of warming and 2° of warming[10]
  • The lack of widespread climate conversations currently taking place

Is the main job of climate communicators to give people hope?

In my post Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning?, I quote Marshall Ganz who says that the way to master urgency is to mobilize hope because hope is what allows us to deal with problems creatively.

But, in contrast, Greta Thunberg, probably the world’s most famous climate communicator, is sceptical about hope, if hope means a dream of the future you don’t really mean to act on. “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope, I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic, I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act, I want you to act as if you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house was on fire, because it is.”[11]

Thunberg calls for action, based on the science, just as Salamon does, and she uses both rationality and emotion to convey her uncompromising truth-telling. She exudes authenticity. In some ways, her example confirms gradualist principles – such as starting close to home, speaking from heart, articulating clear messages,  speaking to and mobilising her peers – and yet her boldness is clearly in line with the emergency mobilisation approach.

In a new book, The Book of Hope, Jane Goodall says:

“Hope does not deny all the difficulty and all the danger that exists, but it is not stopped by them. There is a lot of darkness, but our actions create the light… It is important to take action and realise that we can make a difference, and this will encourage others to take action, and then we realise we are not alone and our cumulative actions truly make an even greater difference. That is how we spread the light. And this, of course, makes us all ever more hopeful.”[12]

Summary of key points

  • In contrast to the ‘gradualist’ approach, the Climate Mobilisation movement emphasises the urgency and danger of the climate and ecological emergencies. They emphasise the risk of tipping points in nature if we don’t decarbonise within the next 10 years.
  • Salamon and others criticise the gradualist view that we must not scare the public; rather, we should tell them the truth loudly and help them face up to reality.
  • Individually, facing climate truth requires personal transformation – we will need to change our plans and expectations. Collectively, we need to enter into ‘emergency mode’, as during World War II.
  • Salamon invites us to generate masses of climate conversations at ground level, starting with family and friends and expanding from there.
  • The main aim of these conversations should be to make people aware of the need for systemic change and to encourage them to take political action.
  • The gradualist riposte is their long-standing view that a confrontational approach turns many people off. The climate scientist, Michael Mann, says ‘doomism’ leads to ‘inactivism’. Science does not support the likelihood of imminent, catastrophic tipping points, he says, and action is still possible to prevent things getting even worse.
  • Mann and Salamon agree on calling for a World War II style emergency mobilisation and they agree that, in climate communications, ‘urgency must always be balanced with agency’.
  • Balancing urgency and agency requires skill and flexibility from the climate communicator. Where possible, we should place negative information in a narrative arc that leads to a positive resolution. Another approach is to think in terms of ‘good news’ and ‘bad news’, drawing on examples appropriate to the particular audience.
  • The next big challenge for us as climate communicators in South Yorkshire is to become skilful in moving people up a notch to a higher degree of awareness and commitment.
  • Direct appeals to fear should be used with understanding of when they are, or are not, effective. (See appendix below.)
  • Some people say that the way to master urgency is to mobilize hope but there is a risk that hope alone does not need to determined action. It may be the other way round: it may be that, by taking action, we generate hope.

If you would like some more specific advice on when to use or not use ‘fear-based appeals’, please see the appendix below.

Appendix: Climate emergency mode and fear appeals

The gradualist consensus about ‘appeals to fear’ is to use them with care. Adam Corner and Jamie Clarke review the literature and comment: “The lesson from public-health campaigns and the academic literature for climate change engagement is not that campaigners should downplay the risks or avoid making people feel negative emotions. Fear-based messaging can be effective when [it meets all of the following conditions]:

  • it depicts a significant and relevant threat
  • as a short-term method of attracting attention and raising salience
  • for those already on the ‘right path’  to changing behaviours
  • and when proportionate and constructive responses to the threat described also identified.
  • But it can also be counter-productive, and so this type of approach should be deployed with care.”[13]

Joseph P. Reser and Graham L. Bradley[14] make similar points:

  • Fear messages must induce the amount of fear that is optimal for the particular goal, audience, and context. Too little fear may not engage and energize; too much may overwhelm.
  • More likely to be effective if used in ways that conform to general principles of effective persuasive communication (e.g. use of attractive and credible sources, clear and comprehensible content, tailoring to the audience, etc.)
  • Unlikely to be effective unless accompanied by instructions or practical advice as to what actions should be taken. (Instructions that break the needed behavioural responses into short-term, achievable goals may increase self-efficacy and encourage engagement.)
  • Framed in ways that appeal to the audience. The message should not, in particular, be framed in ways that threaten the livelihood, deep-seated values, sense of self, and/or social identity of the audience.

They emphasise the importance of the audience believing they are able to make a  difference. “When the baseline levels of audience efficacy… are low, presentation of efficacy information may be more important than presentation of threat information, because, in the absence of efficacy beliefs, threat information may lead not to adaptive attempts to manage the threat, but to psychological reactance and fear control responses including message derogation and attributions of manipulative intent.”

They offer the following advice:

  • Given the potential for unwanted outcomes (including diminishing returns from repeated use, and boomerang effects), fear appeals need to be used with caution. Their content and mode of presentation need to be pilot tested in settings that approximate their intended use with refinements made based on feedback received.
  • Seek alternatives to fear appeals such as appeals to positive emotions, to hope rather than to fear. While some advocate strategies that draw on feelings of worry and interest, others recommend the use of empathy-inducing messages, humour, and, for younger audiences, post-modern irony.

Notes

[1] Wallace-Wells, David. (2019) The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming. New York. Tim Duggan Books. https://www.crisrieder.org/thejourney/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-Uninhabitable-Earth-David-Wallace-Wells.pdf

[2] I am writing this in late 2021.

[3] https://climateoutreach.org/reports/how-to-have-a-climate-change-conversation-talking-climate/

[4] The Climate Communication Project at CAST can be accessed here: https://theclimatecommsproject.org/ Their Nov 2018 report: Climate communication in practice: how are we engaging the UK public on climate change? can be found at:

[5] Specific recommendations for climate communications made by the panellists have been distributed through this paper.

[6] See, for example, Bill Gates’ discussion of ‘green premiums’ (the extra costs of moving to renewable sources of energy) in his new book, ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. (2021). Allen Lane.

[7] Surely we can have high expectations of our political representatives and challenge them to confront the reality, no matter how uncomfortable? And yet, Hope for the Future points out that even politicians are human beings and if we don’t approach them thoughtfully, we probably won’t get through to them.

[8] As for example in his presentation at the University of Sheffield in November 2017.

[9] Macy, Joanna and Johnstone, Chris. (2012). Active Hope. Novato. New World Library. https://www.activehope.info/

[10] Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºChttps://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ Kathy Aston comments: “Yes, I think this is key. One degree or half of one degree seems so little! I’ve found the factoid that the world was only 6 degrees colder during the last ice age to be quite useful.”

[11] World Economic Forum, Davos, January 25, 2019

Accessed 31.05.21 at: https://www.environmentshow.com/greta-thunberg-quotes/  Thanks to Heather Hunt for this note.

[12] Goodall, Jane and Abrams, Douglas. (2021) The Book of Hope, A Survival Guide for an Endangered Planet. Penguin Random House UK.

[13] Corner, Adam and Clarke,  Jamie. (2017) Talking Climate, From Research to Practice in Public Engagement. Oxford, Palgrave.

[14] Fear Appeals in Climate Change Communication by Joseph P. Reser and Graham L. Bradley (2017). https://oxfordre.com/climatescience/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228620-e-386?__prclt=9mz3Yntu

Climate communications: the pros and cons of different ‘frames’

This is one of a series of posts entitled Principles and Advice for Grassroots Climate Communicators, in which I share and reflect on a range of ideas within the field, with a view to helping grassroots activists and groups communicate effectively. For an overview of approaches and challenges in the field, please see my post Climate Communications – An Overview.

I start this post with the table that you may already have seen in the first post in this series. After that, I reflect on the pros and cons of the different frames, to help you think which ones best resonate with you and your community. A summary of key points can be found at the bottom.

What is a frame?

Because climate change is multifaceted – almost all encompassing – there are many different ways to look at it and climate communicators and campaigners tend to select a particular ‘lens’ or ‘frame’ through which to look at it or to focus their activities. A ‘frame’ is essentially a way to simplify a complex phenomenon, perhaps claiming that such and such an aspect is at the heart of it, or is the best way in to understanding it or affecting it. Frames commonly used in climate communications include the ones below. I have put them in a table with the main assumptions underlying each frame on the left, as I see them, and an example of a practical application on the right.

Frame with its core assumptionExamples
Information: people need to know the facts about global warming in order to appreciate how serious the situation is.The Carbon Literacy Project proposes that every citizen should have one day’s training covering the basic facts of global warming,  tailored to be relevant  to the specific audience.
Persuasion: people need to be persuaded to face the issue and take action, either through some kind of reward or through appeals to their deeper values and identity.Climate Outreach proposes that climate communicators research the interests, values and needs of particular communities, and try to link climate action with what matters to them. At a commercial level, advertisers are increasingly using ‘green’ language and imagery in order to persuade people to buy their products.
Conversation: human beings aren’t atomised individuals, we form our views through dialogue with others.Carbon Conversations is a six session course designed originally for community settings. The participants explore the facts and their feelings about cutting their carbon footprints through conversation and enjoyable games. I myself have run a simpler version, called Climate Conversations,  focusing down on teaching skills in listening and constructive argumentation. In the political arena, Hope for the Future has developed a model for the constructive lobbying of MPs,  based on the Non-Violent Communication approach (NVC).
Emotion: on the one hand, climate change raises strong negative emotions which block people’s engagement (‘disavowal’), so the way forward has to include confronting those emotions; on the other, it is positive emotions that motivate people.The Active Hope approach involves running workshops where people are taken on an emotional journey,  facing up to their repressed fears, expressing their grief and working through to ‘seeing the world with new eyes’.
Reason: although it may be limited, human beings are capable of reason; the climate crisis raises both profound philosophical questions and challenges us to think logically and strategically.Grace Lockrobin and other ‘community philosophers’ are running events online, in communities and in schools that support and challenge participants to think about environmental issues critically and philosophically.
Choice: the climate crisis confronts us with difficult choices, including technical, moral and political.David McKay and Mark Lynas ran an event at the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield where they challenged the audience to think through the difficult choices that will be need to be made if renewables are to replace all fossil fuels.
Storytelling, Imagination and the Arts: Human beings don’t live by logical arguments, we live by myths and stories – about our own lives, about our societies and about the meaning of our lives – and we are moved by images. Art is a fundamental part of who we are. If you want to reach people you need to stimulate their senses and imaginations.Community artists draw on a wide range of art forms to connect with people’s subconscious, personal icons and imaginations. Michigan University runs an online course in Storytelling for Social Change. Marshall Ganz and others run workshops to help activists discover and/or write their own ‘story’ as social change agents.
Action: a surfeit of words is off-putting to many, they would rather be drawn into doing interesting things and by acting they will feel both purposeful and hopeful. Activities which help people to ‘fall back in love with nature’ maybe particularly effective.The Transition Town movement focuses on practical activities such as growing organic foods that can draw people in. Trees for Life takes groups out into the woods to learn forestry skills and also hold dialogues away from the stresses of urban life.
Empowerment: the problem isn’t knowledge or understanding, the problem is people feeling that they can do nothing about it, so climate communicators should focus on giving people the tools and skills they need to change things.Many Transition Town projects teach practical skills, especially relating to working in nature. The Carbon Conversations course includes auditing your own energy use, travel and purchases, and supports participants to develop practical action plans. My own Climate Conversations courses teach skills in listening and dialogue.
Motivation: people need appealing visions, encouragement, inspiration and other rewards such as enjoyment in order to want to engage with what can otherwise seem a daunting task.The Active Hope approach aims to inspire people by taking them through a challenging but liberating emotional process. Many writers have produced books full of good ideas and lively imagery for young people and for adults. Extinction Rebellion has stated its aim to promote a ‘regenerative’  culture to reduce the risk of burnout amongst activists.
Leadership development: climate communicators should place the emphasis on those most likely to lead the transition to sustainability, the others will follow.Former US Vice President, Al Gore, has created the Climate Reality programme  which trains people up as climate leaders and communicators, especially young adults.
Political mobilisation: commentators frequently emphasise that the biggest obstacles to change are a lack of political will and/or vested interests. Moreover, individuals and communities have limited power to change the wider society, so people need to understand the need for political action.Environmental activists continue to campaign in various ways, increasingly seeking to attract attention through eye-catching creative actions.  Historically, they have tended to come from the left of the political spectrum but increasingly activists in the centre and centre right are speaking up (e.g. the Conservative Environment Network.) Hope for the Future is promoting a conciliatory approach to lobbying. Community Organising is one of many approaches to grass roots political engagement.
Emergency mobilisation: the situation is perilous and the emphasis should be on communicating urgency and generating absolute determination across society, akin to mobilising a society for war.Climate Mobilisation and Extinction Rebellion seek to draw the general public’s attention to the need for urgent and radical action.

There are strengths and weaknesses in each of these frames; given that a frame is a selective tool, this is not surprising. In the discussion below, I share my own reflections, in the hope that they will stimulate you to think which frames best align with your own values,  context and priorities.

The frames that I discuss below are generic and it is not an exclusive list. We could add to it specific sectors or needs, such as health or food. Where the general public does not respond to the rather abstract concept of climate change, it may respond better to a frame that is clearly of immediate personal relevance. For example, a group of General Practitioners in the UK have formed Greener Practice to draw the attention of both their colleagues and their patients to the healthy co-benefits of sustainability, such as ‘active travel’, meaning walking and cycling – helping people stay fit whilst also reducing road pollution and carbon emissions. (https://www.greenerpractice.co.uk/)

Information

The premise here is that people need to know and understand accurate information about global warming and the predictions that the experts are making in order to appreciate how serious the situation is. They also need accurate information in order to understand the potentials and the limitations of technological solutions.

However, many members of the general population find science and technology off-putting or they do not understand scientific method, especially the way that risks are assessed, so they switch off, get confused or are easy prey for denialists.

Part of the answer lies in presenting information in attractive, creative and interesting ways, tailored to the specific audience. The Carbon Literacy Project, for example, proposes that every citizen should be given training to understand the essential facts about climate change, but they emphasise that the design and delivery should be relevant and appealing to the particular audience.

To assist with translating information into action, your group could perhaps consider recruiting a number of good communicators of science and technology –  not academics but people with practical skills. I have found, when facilitating Carbon Conversations and climate conversations courses, that it has been enormously helpful to have somebody there with knowledge and expertise in such matters as home insulation that I am no good at.

(Ideally, information about the climate and the ecological emergencies should be moved to the centre of both educational curricula and journalistic programming. They should no longer be seen as abstruse scientific topics; they should be seen as central to our human endeavour in all fields. But that may be beyond the scope of the your group’s project!)

Persuasion

Rooted in the practices of social marketing, the persuasion approach is based on trying to make pro-environmental behaviours seem attractive, in the same way that goods are advertised. Not surprisingly, this approach is increasingly being used by businesses trying to tap into the new public awareness of sustainability when selling their products, and by businesses explicitly marketing ‘environmentally friendly’ products. We are all deeply embedded in capitalist culture and, while some may not like the idea, consumer choices do interact with and affect social norms.

One version is ‘nudge theory’, premised on the idea that humans beings like to conform to what other people are doing – they will adopt sustainable behaviours if such behaviours seem like ‘the new normal’. “Nudge theory is based on the idea that little things can make a big difference and you only have to tip the balance slightly to steer people into making better decisions, especially if those decisions align with their personal values…  The theory argues that nudges should be easy, attractive and social.”[1] (The current UK government has a ‘nudge unit’ based on this theory.)

Another version of the persuasion approach emphasises culture and identity, especially core values. If a climate communicator understands their audience well, they will use language and concepts that link pro-environmental behaviours to that audience’s values and beliefs. Climate Outreach, for example, has undertaken extensive research to test the messages that most appeal to different social groups, including faith groups and conservative groups who historically have tended to be opposed to climate action.[2] It is not so much a question, they say, of using particular words or messages to influence an audience, but of having the sensitivity to understand the audience’s worldview and to avoid giving offence and alienating them.[3] (Some examples are given in the box below.)

The downside of all these approaches is that audiences may feel manipulated – or may respond in a superficial way, for example, not appreciating the true depth of the challenges that face us. To counteract these risks, Climate Outreach emphasises the importance of employing ‘trusted messengers’ who come across as (and are) authentic, able to speak from the heart and build genuine, respectful relationships with audiences.

A different objection to the social marketing approach has been registered on an ideological basis. Some commentators see capitalism as the root cause of the climate crisis; premised on never-ending growth, capitalism can be seen as ‘extractive’, taking and using natural (and human) resources in order to grow profits and taking no responsibility for the ‘waste products’  of industrial processes. Seen within this frame, social marketing is an appropriation of methods primarily used in advertising to manipulate consumers. Such commentators are sceptical about the notion of ‘conscious consumerism’, the implication being that, in order to prevent disastrous global warming, we just have to persuade people to buy different things. What is needed is a whole new social and economic system.

The trouble with that approach is that it makes enemies of those who support capitalism or hope to reform it to make it more sustainable. Policies designed to decarbonise the economy are going to need the support of the vast majority, if they are to succeed. Surveys show that there is a strong correlation between political ideology and attitude to climate change – people on the right are more likely to oppose climate action; people on the left are more likely to support it. Climate communicators are still discussing how best to transcend these divides. The good news is that many more conservatives in developed countries are now speaking up about the problem. However, most of them place their face in market-based solutions, such as the development of new green industries and businesses, and the question of how extensive state intervention should, or should not, be is as yet unresolved.

Conversation

In The #Talking Climate Handbook[4], Climate Outreach makes the case that what is most important at this point in time is to build a ‘social mandate’ for government action – in other words, enough people in the general population need to be calling on their political representatives for them to feel obliged and supported to take action. Their focus is not on promoting particular messages but rather on generating conversations. The handbook lays out some guidelines for successful climate conversations, emphasising respectful listening and asking interested questions.

In theory, this approach sidesteps the questions of having and giving information; it is enough to bring the topic into the light. But in practice, based on my own experience of running a short course with University students in this approach, people feel more confident to initiate conversations if they also feel confident of the key facts. So next time around, we plan to run two courses, the first one in ‘carbon literacy’, the second in applying that knowledge. The latter will include learning and practising communication skills as well as planning and engaging in practical actions to reduce the carbon footprints of both the individual students and the University overall.

Two key takeaways from this pilot climate conversations course which may be useful for climate communicators to bear in mind are:

  • The students very much enjoyed learning listening and questioning skills which they said would be useful for them in many areas of their lives, not only in climate campaigning;
  • They especially appreciated an exercise where they were asked to think about and share their own values – something that most of them had never consciously articulated before.[5]

Emotion

A number of climate campaigners emphasise the importance of emotion. Rooted in psychoanalytic theory, they are interested in “the personal histories that lie beneath the surface.”[6] They say that human beings naturally put up psychological defences to defend themselves from painful realities. Most people are in a state of ‘disavowal’ or denial about the dangers of global warming and they won’t be able to take action until they acknowledge and confront repressed emotions such as fear and grief. Climate communicators therefore need both to share their own emotions and to support others to face theirs. This best takes place in a group where the process of sharing one’s own feelings and listening to those of others enables a range of insights and builds solidarity. Rosemary Randall refers to this as a ‘psycho-social’ approach. It underlies the Carbon Conversations model that she helped to create – a short course of six meetings in which a group of people support each other to examine climate information, share their feelings, and plan their personal carbon reduction strategies.[7] On the face of it a friendly, accessible course with a well-designed, informative manual, Carbon Conversations actually aims to go deep and potentially requires sophisticated group facilitation skills.

The emotion-based approach has a clear logic but it raises the Catch-22 problem of disavowal. How do you encourage people to face up to something they don’t want to face up to? Few people are going to eagerly embrace the idea of something like a therapeutic workshop. Recruitment is a major challenge to such groups and it is difficult to see how the approach could be scaled up.

However, the principles of this work can perhaps be applied across a variety of contexts by a skilled climate communicator. The Active Hope approach developed by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone offers a useful framework for taking people on an empowering emotional journey:

  1. expressing our gratitude for the things that we love in the world; 
  2. making a safe space to recognise and honour the painful feelings we have about the emergency;
  3. opening our eyes to discover new things about ourselves and what we can contribute;
  4. going out to take action.[8]

Even where the circumstances are not conducive to a deep examination of this journey, climate communicators might apply it in miniature, even within a single conversation, the fundamental aims being to (a) help people to face up to what is happening but also (b) feel empowered to do something about it.

Psychologist Heather Hunt comments: “A useful part of Joanna Macy’s approach is honouring our feelings. If we feel grief about extinctions, for example, then that means we feel deep love for nature. If we feel anger, then we want justice. This perspective gives the positive emotions as motivation.”[9] It does seem to me that the psychoanalytically based commentators focus too much on the problems of negative emotions and disavowal; what is missing from this discussion is the engagement of positive emotions, as Hunt says. It is one reason that Climate Outreach and others advocate ‘telling your own story’, speaking from the heart, because that way you can arouse empathy in others.

Asserting the value of the emotions for social and political engagement implies a place for rhetoric in our campaigning and projects, and a place for drama. Skilled rhetoricians know how to engage the public’s passions, and we should not eschew that opportunity. Stephen Duncombe points out that some campaigners are fearful of rhetoric because they associate it with appeals to mindlessness, to prejudice and unthinking populism. He proposes that ‘progressive’ campaigners should learn to use rhetoric (and spectacle too) rather than be afraid of it.[10]

One solution to the problem of disavowal may be to offer non-threatening activities and use them as the opportunity for gradually deepening conversations as the trust builds. Whatever the way in, climate communicators do need to be prepared to support people to deal with what is increasingly called ‘eco-anxiety’ which may surface at unexpected moments. People at all levels of engagement may suddenly have a perception of how deep the problems are,  they may move into a personal space of existential crisis. It is probably advisable to build some kind of listening/counselling support into all activities, a bit like First Aid, to be called on if and when necessary. (This post does not go into eco-anxiety in any depth – I may write more on it in the future.)

For further discussion of so-called negative emotions, see my post ‘Emergency mobilisation’: the heated debate about the harnessing of uncomfortable feelings – and some possible solutions.

Reason

An approach to climate communications perhaps still emerging is one based in reasoning. In recent decades, psychological research has increasingly emphasised the non-rational side of human beings, how most of our behaviour is led by ‘what is beneath the surface’ (to quote Ro Randall again.) But in my view, that understanding only heightens the need for us to maximise the limited rationality that we are capable of, as part of a multi-pronged approach. As philosopher, Grace Lockrobin, says: “Philosophical, political, emotional and practical issues run through any discussion about climate change, so there is a need for multi-layered discussion and exploration, combined with the commitment to critical examination of one’s own assumptions, biases and allegiances.” Along with her colleague Michelle Sowey, Grace co-convenes an online group ‘Community Philosophy and the Climate Crisis’.[11] Both Grace and Michelle argue that philosophical enquiry is a vital part of climate education. Grace advocates climate enquiry with children still in primary school[12], while in a recent interview, Michelle interviews a philosophy graduate and activist who talks about “how studying philosophy [had] helped her come to terms with the climate and ecological emergency, how it opened her eyes to the failure of the social contract, and why she now sees civil disobedience as a moral imperative.”[13]

At a more instrumental level, the critical thinking skills developed by philosophers are still not widely taught within western education systems. Many of us are not well-equipped to make and evaluate logical arguments, to appraise evidence, to understand statistics, to assess risks or to develop complex strategies. Critical thinking challenges inevitably surface in climate education activities, whether the main focus is on information, emotion or practical action. The risk here is that the general public is turned off by something that can seem academic, especially if formal terms are used. But my contention is that there is nothing more exciting than a revelatory critical examination of one’s own or others’ arguments, providing it is handled in a constructive fashion. Adopting the so-called ‘principle of charity’ under which one seeks, as one’s top priority, to understand the arguments, beliefs and values of one’s opponents makes it more likely that constructive dialogue can take place, transcending the tribalistic boundaries of typical political discourse.[14] “We find ourselves in a dilemma,” Grace says. “The climate emergency is now so urgent that we are torn between the desperation to see rapid action and the knowledge that hasty action might be counter-productive. Critical thinking is therefore required for us to achieve clarity; philosophical practice may take us even deeper, helping us to examine our values and beliefs, confronting us with difficult questions of priority, connecting us to different philosophical and political traditions from which we can learn.” [15]

John Cook also points out that critical thinking skills are needed to spot, explain and unpick the tactics of climate deniers (for more information on his ‘inoculation’ approach, see the box in Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators.)

One tool for improving critical thinking and discussion that I think could be very useful to the climate movement is Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. For those who don’t know this useful model, the different colours of ‘hat’ refer to different focuses for thinking and discussion. The white hat represents facts – in our case, the science, the evidence. The red hat is for feelings; there are plenty of those around this issue, and I’m not sure they are yet being handled with emotional intelligence. The yellow hat is for optimism and in contrast, the black hat is for pessimism, for critical judgement. We need both of these in the climate movement and there is a false polarisation between those who assert that we must be positive all the time and those who say we must face up to the worst possible scenarios all the time. In fact, we need to move thoughtfully between the two positions. The green hat is for new ideas and there is a plethora of them out there – which should give us some optimism! (Of course, we need to be putting the most promising of these ideas into action.) Lastly, the blue hat is for process, as when you take on the role of a chair in a meeting and you stand back to consider where the discussion is going and what next step would be most productive. (For more info on the 6 thinking hats model see: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_07.htm.)

Choice

Heather Hunt proposed to me that I should add choice to my list of frames. She points to the book entitled ‘The Future We Choose’, co-authored by Christiana Figueres, a key figure in the international climate negotiations in Paris in 2015.[16] In the table above, I give the example of a presentation by David McKay and Mark Lynas in which they confronted us in the audience with difficult choices about renewable energy. Making choices and decisions is one aspect of critical thinking, as it is now commonly understood: critical thinking is not just a matter of understanding intellectually or philosophically what the dilemmas are, it is the weighing up of evidence and priorities with a view to making a decision and taking action. The climate and nature emergencies confront us with many tricky choices. A classic example is nuclear power: is it ‘sustainable’ or not? Does it solve all our problems – or does it create more? In the end, politicians have to make decisions about such matters, and so do voters, when it comes to elections. As Stuart Hanscomb points out in his book, Critical Thinking the basics[17], it is not that critical thinking procedures will necessarily reveal a perfect solution to complex problems, but there is a better chance of a ‘best fit’ solution if the evidence and view points have been thoughtfully weighed up through constructive critical dialogue.

Action

Contextualising climate communications within a framework of practical action may serve to engage people in a meaningful – and perhaps enjoyable – way, developing their sense of ‘perceived behavioural control’, self-efficacy or agency, and contributing to measurable carbon reductions. Moreover, each new project, whether at community level, in industry, in commerce or in policy, brings new learnings. In a sense, a society-wide research project is taking place;  the challenge of decarbonisation is unprecedented and the more people who are engaged in investigating it, the more we as a society will understand about what does and doesn’t work.

The theory of change here is that, once engaged in a localised but purposeful, communal endeavour, people will become more aware of the wider implications. They will be more likely to ask questions, to seek answers and to get more involved – especially if they trust and respect the integrity and expertise of those running the project.

A prominent strand of thought within the climate movement is to encourage people to ‘fall back in love with nature’.[18] The thinking is that many people in industrialised societies have lost a sense of connection to the natural world. Engaging people in enjoyable and/or challenging activities in the outdoors, especially those that involve a stewarding role, may help them to reflect on the bigger picture of the climate and ecological emergencies, whilst also reminding them of the intrinsic pleasures of physical activity in the outdoors. David Attenborough has said: “No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced.”

Considering action as part of climate communications potentially takes us over a boundary, moving beyond engagement (getting people’s attention) towards politicisation. Action of course is not a single thing; there are many different types of action possible and these could be seen in a ladder or progression. A very simple version might be: 

  1. Easy/quick things you can do 
  2. Getting more active / contributing to the movement 
  3. Becoming a leader for sustainability 

Embracing active care for the climate and all living things may also take us into spiritual territory. In recent years, different faith groups, such as Muslims, Jews and Catholics, have publicly stated their conviction that humans have a responsibility to be stewards of the earth.[19]

Action can help climate communicators in another way: Roger Hallam, one of the founders of the Extinction Rebellion movement, has recently pointed out that people become more engaged if they physically move around! His  comments are a critique of dull political meetings where people sit still. This is one reason why creative activities may be an important feature of the climate communicator’s toolkit (see also Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning?.)

Many people like to make and do. Moreover, creative activities can engage the imagination and emotions, enhancing meaningfulness. In ‘Paradise Is Here, Building Community Around Things That Matter”, Ruth Nutter lays out some principles for creative forms of community engagement, including: being visible in daily life, inviting openly and instructing clearly, giving permission to think and do differently, connecting with care and using plenty of paper.[20]

I think action is very important but it does not mean ignoring the other frames. It is up to the skilled practitioner to explore how best to integrate within practical activities scientific and technological information, opportunities for conversation, critical thinking and emotional reflection, and questions for philosophical or political investigation. There is much to be learned here from the expertise of community and educational arts workers. It may be that one of the keys to success is collaboration – designing projects which bring together creative practitioners with partners with sector specific knowledge and skills (e.g. in sustainable construction), as well as skilled climate communicators, all of them working closely with the participants to go on a shared journey of discovery.

One caveat is that some people feel threatened by activities that look artistic, performative,  embarrassing or personally exposing, so it is important that the initial offer is non-threatening, enjoyable and free from pressure.

A distinct realm of action is political protest. Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future have been widely acknowledged as having successfully raised the issue in the general public’s awareness through non-violent direct action. However there have been some criticisms. At a recent webinar on climate communications, Rosemary Randall suggested that it is important to have calm conversations with members of the public while engaged in such protests, to explain the rationale behind them. Stuart Capstick was concerned when the public itself felt targeted by non-violent direct action; he thought it was better to target the media, the financial system, etc.[21]

Please note that some commentators argue that climate advocacy efforts focused on the actions of individuals simply makes people feel guilty, while acting as a distraction from the role of big polluters in driving climate change and the need for wider system change driven by governments.[22]

Politicisation and the role of the arts and creativity are discussed further in:

  • Politicisation: how can climate communicators help people move into campaigning?
  • Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning?

Empowerment and motivation

Some climate communicators may prioritise the aims of empowerment (giving people the knowledge and ability to contribute effectively) and motivation (stimulating people’s passion and determination.) Again, these frames take us over the boundary into politicisation; in my post on that topic I refer to some examples of different approaches. Common threads seem to include: listening to people’s concerns, understanding their needs, respecting their values and building solidarity, whilst providing opportunities to experience participating in actions that have an impact, building confidence and resilience.

I am intrigued by Marshall Ganz’s idea that motivating people means moving from a focus on the self to a focus on the collective, telling ‘the story of us’. This is a different perspective from the Community Organising one that says that human beings are inherently self-interested and will only do things if they perceive a personal reward.[23]

Leadership development

Experienced climate activists and communicators may decide that the most useful frame or focus for their communications is to nurture the next generation of leaders, at whatever level of society. The enormous impact of Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement that she inspired has awakened many older politicians and activists to the significance of the younger generation, who are increasingly spelling out that they are the ones who are going to have to live with the impacts of climate change. In Politicisation: how can climate communicators help people move into campaigning?, I quote Keith Allott, Director (Power Transition), European Climate Foundation, who told me that upcoming leaders need to have a credible theory of change and the ability to think strategically over the longer term – qualities that often seem to be missing from our current, short-termist political leadership.

What are the implications at community level? I would suggest that the ethical leader is continually nurturing new leaders, modelling and teaching skills in engaging, inspiring and empowering others. The process may start small, giving people simple but responsible tasks to carry out, only offering more challenging tasks when the person has built up their confidence. Given that it seems likely that the social transformation required can only happen if it is supported by all sectors of society, nurturing the leadership skills of those who are often overlooked or disparaged may be particularly important.[24]

A more aspirational manifestation of this ambition is Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corps. The website states:

“We believe real change comes from the ground up. We know that a small-but-committed critical mass of activists can not only transform society, but change the world. That’s why we recruit, train, and mobilize people to become powerful activists, providing the skills, campaigns, and resources to push for aggressive climate action and high-level policies that accelerate a just transition to clean energy… Alongside these efforts, our dynamic communications initiatives connect climate and behavioural science with the emotional power of compelling stories, raising awareness and inspiring action in online audiences everywhere.”[25]

I don’t know how well the Climate Reality project is going down in the UK; I have a suspicion that it might come over as rather American and un-English but I would like feedback from somebody who has been directly involved. Personally, I like the idea of climate leadership programmes for young people and I know that there are various models out there. One question I would have is whether they tend to attract middle-class people – which is fine and appropriate for people who want to work with and influence middle-class people; but wouldn’t it be great if your group could engage working class people too?  This is one reason why I have included the notes on community organising in my post on Politicisation.

Political mobilisation

Policies designed to decarbonise the economy are going to need the support of the vast majority, if they are to succeed. Surveys have often shown a strong correlation between political ideology and attitude to climate change – people on the right more likely to oppose climate action, people on the left more likely to support it. The picture seems to have changed somewhat since 2018, however. The growing visibility and immediacy of extreme weather events and the high-profile impacts of Friday for Future, Extinction Rebellion, David Attenborough and others has hopefully put climate denial beyond the pale. Increasingly, citizens agree that they are concerned about climate change. However, they (we) demonstrate a considerable gap between concern and action (the ‘value/action gap’) and the politicians who are best equipped to lead on systemic change are only just beginning to demonstrate a commitment to transcending tribal divides and opposing the vested interests of powerful climate deniers.

Climate communicators are still discussing how best to approach the political question. For some, it is a moral imperative to contextualise climate and ecological action within a ‘progressive’ vision of wholesale social transformation, rejecting capitalism either substantially or totally. On the other side are those who see capitalism as an eternal verity and advocate pragmatic changes to steer it in a more sustainable direction.

At a basic level, one thing that community climate communicators can do is to help citizens see the importance of lobbying their political representatives, whichever side they may be on. When asked what was the single most impactful action for ordinary citizens to take, Al Gore said to get your political representatives to pass laws.[26] The thinking here is that only governments can pass laws to restrain the fossil fuel corporations and other polluters, creating a ‘level playing field,’ and to convert infrastructure to prevent carbon emissions.

The climate scientist, Michael E. Mann, warns that the new strategy of the fossil fuel lobby, now that denial is a difficult position to uphold, is to give the message to citizens that they should focus on changing their personal carbon footprints, because this distracts them from the greater truth that systemic change is required.[27]

I share and discuss some different approaches to this matter in my post Politicisation: how can climate communicators help people move into campaigning?

Emergency mobilisation

This is such an important frame that I have written a separate post about it.[28] It only comes at the end of this list because all the other frames above can be seen as falling within a common ‘gradualist’ approach which emphasises being accessible to different audiences and not scaring or overwhelming them. The emergency mobilisation approach is far less reassuring; in fact it is all about telling people just how serious the situation is – with a view to galvanising them into determined action. I go into the pros and cons of this approach in my other post; for now, the brief summary is that climate communicators need to learn how to convey both urgency and agency (the latter overlapping with my comments on empowerment and motivation above.)

So, which of all these frames should your group focus on?

The purpose of these posts is to throw that question back to you – both your steering group and the comms practitioners on your team. Each of the frames has its merits but also its downsides. Probably, as skilled climate communicators, you would want to work in more than one frame, in order to maximise your effectiveness, but you need to be led by consideration of your audiences and your high-level aims and objectives.

In Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators, I have tried to synthesise the communications advice proffered from many different quarters into a single set of recommendations. This may seem a mistaken project, because of the differences between the frames. But my take on climate communications is pragmatic; I assume that a variety of different methods will be needed to reach different people in different situations at different times, and that the essential attribute of the good communicator is summed up in Stephen Covey’s aphorism, “Seek first to understand; and then to be understood.”[29]

And despite the differences in emphasis, it seems to me that a number of shared concerns run through many of the frames, e.g.

  • the importance of engaging citizens in conversation and reflection
  • the importance of understanding each audience and adapting your approach to suit
  • the need for sensitive and skilful facilitation with individuals and groups, including ways of countermanding disavowal and supporting people with eco-anxiety
  • the importance of balancing urgency with agency

Finally, one other shared perception gets to the heart of what we are doing as community-based climate communicators: wider public engagement is needed. This is so for at least two reasons. Firstly, the society-wide political and economic changes that we need can only be put in place by governments. But, as Sheffield politician Paul Blomfield has emphasised, MPs are elected to represent their constituents’ concerns; if their constituents are not pestering them about climate change it is hard for them to prioritise taking action on it. But secondly, and more profoundly, the changes will not be possible without widespread public support; no government can order radical change from above if the people do not understand the reasons why and see the benefits to them individually, and to their communities. This is not to lay the emphasis on individual change when clearly our loudest call must be for system change led by government; however the two are symbiotic, as a recent report by Climate Outreach asserts.[30]

Summary

  • There are many different ‘lenses’ or ‘frames’ though which to look at climate communications, including: Information; Persuasion; Conversation; Emotion; Reason; Choice; Storytelling, Imagination and the Arts; Action; Empowerment; Motivation; Leadership development; Political mobilisation; and Emergency mobilisation.
  • Each frame has its strengths and its weaknesses; some frames will align better with your own audiences, values and priorities.
  • The most commonly used frames share the gradualist approach. However the emergency mobilisation approach is important and has become stronger in recent years.
  • As skilled climate communicators, you will probably want to work in more than one frame, in order to maximise your effectiveness, but you need to be led by consideration of your audiences and your high-level aims and objectives.
  • A number of concerns unite many of the frames, including: engaging citizens in conversation and reflection; understanding each audience and adapting your approach to suit; the need for sensitive and skilful facilitation with individuals and groups; and the importance of balancing urgency with agency.
  • An over-arching concern for all community-based climate communicators is that wider public engagement is needed.

Notes

[1] Green and Ethical checklist supplement in The Guardian 03.04.21

[2] See Appendix C for some notes on appealing to particular audiences’ values.

[3] Corner, Adam and Clarke, Jamie. (2017) Talking Climate, From Research to Practice in Public Engagement. Oxford. Palgrave Macmillan.

[4] https://climateoutreach.org/reports/how-to-have-a-climate-change-conversation-talking-climate/

[5] Climate Conversations pilot course run at the University of Sheffield November/December 2020, facilitated by Nick Nuttgens and coordinated by Alice Potter. A summary of the evaluation is available upon request.

[6] Rosemary Randall, Scientists for XR webinar “Beyond Optimism or Doom”,  April 7th, 2021.

[7] Carbon Conversations: http://www.carbonconversations.co.uk/; https://www.surefoot-effect.com/workshops.html

[8] Macy, Joanna & Johnstone, Chris. (2012) Active Hope:  How To Face The Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy. Novato. New World Library.

[9] Personal communication.

[10] Duncombe, Stephen. (2007.) Dream – Re-Imagining Progressive Politics In An Age Of Fantasy. New York. The New Press. See: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/253775.Dream

[11] https://thephilosophyclub.com.au/cpcc/

[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJk21ENpSfc&t=5s

[13] Discussion in “Community Philosophy and the Climate Crisis” email group, April 3rd 2021.

[14] Hanscomb, Stuart. (2017) Critical Thinking, the basics. London, Routledge. P.96

[15] Personal communication, January 2020.

[16] Figueres, Christiana and Rivett-Carnac, Tom. (2020) The Future We Choose / Surviving the Climate Crisis. London. Manilla Press.

[17]Hanscomb, Stuart. (2017) Critical Thinking, the basics. London, Routledge.

[18] Perhaps first put forward by the Buddhist monk, Thich Nat Hanh. See video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RHmc_gyRz8

[19] e.g. Catholic: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html; Muslim: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-islam-can-represent-model-environmental-stewardship; Jewish: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/genesis-and-human-stewardship-of-the-earth/

[20] Nutter, Ruth. (2020). Paradise Is Here, Building Community Around Things That Matter. Sheffield. Guild of St. George.

[21] Beyond optimism or doom: How can we communicate the need for urgent climate action? XR Scientists webinar April 7th 2021.

[22] A useful document on this is ‘Linking individual action and system change in climate advocacy’, produced by Climate Outreach: https://climateoutreach.org/reports/linking-individual-action-system-change-climate-advocacy/

[23] https://catholicclimatemovement.global/marshall-ganz-on-why-stories-matter-in-the-art-and-craft-of-social-change/

[24] I owe these tips to Re-evaluation Counseling, a political therapy organisation I was involved with in the 1980s. I left it because I decided it had cultish traits but it did/does provide an excellent training in engaging people at the emotional level.

[25] https://www.climaterealityproject.org/our-mission. Accessed 14.04.21.

[26] In his film An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017)

[27] Mann, Michael E. (2021) The New Climate War, The Fight To Take Back Our Planet. London. Scribe.

[28] ‘Emergency mobilisation’: the heated debate about the harnessing of uncomfortable feelings – and some possible solutions – to be found on my blog site: https://constructivepolicy.wordpress.com/

[29] The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effective_People

[30] Lifestyle change and system change are two sides of the same coin: https://climateoutreach.org/lifestyle-change-system-change-two-sides-same-coin/

Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators

This is one of a series of blogs entitled Principles and Advice for Grassroots Climate Communicators, in which I share and reflect on a range of ideas within the field, with a view to helping grassroots activists and groups communicate effectively. For an overview of approaches and challenges in the field, please see my post Climate Communications – An Overview.

I have not provided a summary at the end of this post because there simply too many detailed suggestions. Instead I am providing an index so that you can scroll through to find ideas relevant to your current communication needs. I would encourage you to dip in every now and then as there is far too much advice to absorb in a single reading.

I’m aware there are some repetitions; that has occurred because I am emphasising different aspects of related points. If you prefer to go to the original reference documents, which are usually more succinct, you will find them listed in the bibliography attached to my post Climate Communications – An Overview.

Index
a) The purpose of a communications strategy  
b) Some guidance on designing a communications strategy  
c) A repository of tips and models for climate communicators (centred on the ‘gradualist’ approach), organised under 6 headings:  

Approach: be clear about the intentions and values that run through all of your communications
Engagement: get people’s attention / invite them in
Rapport: connect / build a relationship
Conversation: listen and learn
Messaging: deliver reliable information appropriately / persuade
Empowerment: inspire and enable people to take action  

Mention is also made to a 7th topic, Politicisation. I have discussed this in more detail in a separate post – Politicisation: how can climate communicators help people move into campaigning?  

Case studies highlighted in boxes in the text include:
Hope for the Future
Climate Outreach: Britain Talks Climate
Carbon Literacy
John Cook’s work on inoculating people against denialism
Carbon Conversations  

Emergency mobilisation: Please note that this post does not include practical guidance on emergency mobilisation strategies including, for example, direct action. I compiled this document when I was reviewing the literature a few years ago and the emphasis at that time was on the gradualist approach. Now, in 2021, after the enormous success of Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion in boosting the climate and nature emergencies up the political agenda, this seems like a serious omission. I would point grassroots climate communicators wanting advice on more confrontational approaches to look at the Extinction Rebellion website and similar. For a discussion of the pros and cons of the emergency mobilisation approach, please see my post ‘Emergency mobilisation’: the heated debate about the harnessing of uncomfortable feelings – and some possible solutions.

a. The purpose of a communications strategy

Definition and purpose of a communications strategy

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NVCO) provides a useful guide to developing a communications strategy on its website.[28] It says the purpose of a communications strategy is “to help you and your organisation communicate effectively and meet core organisational objectives.”[1] This means that the starting point is to be clear about those objectives. It seems to me that they are likely to include:

  • Letting people know that you exist and why
  • Letting people know about things that you are doing
  • Inviting people to participate in different ways
  • Disseminating accurate information about the climate emergency and its implications for people in your area
  • Countermanding misinformation (errors in understanding), disinformation (incorrect information deliberately promoted with the intention of deceiving) and denial (rejection of climate change science)
  • Provoking discussion and reflection
  • Persuading or encouraging people to take notice and take action
  • Sharing and celebrating successes

My key recommendation to practitioners on the ground is to embrace a learning approach; to try out different messages and approaches with different audiences, and give time to evaluating them, thinking critically about both successes and failures, and adapting practice accordingly.

A fundamental principle: think critically when planning communications

Below I list some of the ‘gradualist’ principles that many people working in this field think work best. However, there are no one-size-fits-all rules. Before engaging in any piece of climate communications, ask yourself the ‘question word questions’:

  • WHO is my audience?
  • WHAT do I want to communicate to them?
  • WHY? What result do I hope for? (Behaviour change? Policy change?)[2]
  • HOW? What content, vocabulary and tone would be most persuasive for the recipient(s)?
  • WHEN and WHERE is that communication likely to be best received?
  • WHO would be a good person to make that communication?

b. Some guidance on designing a communications strategy

Most of these recommendations are taken directly from: Communicating climate change: A practitioner’s guide. Insights from Africa, Asia and Latin America. (Climate and Development Knowledge Network 2019.)[3] This is an excellent resource written by somebody working in the field and I strongly recommend that grassroots climate communicators study the whole document. Although it is aimed at practice in developing countries, where people may be living on the front lines of climate change and climate impacts may be more salient, many of the principles apply in the UK too.

Below you will find the main headings/recommendations from that guide. There is much more detail in the original document. (Please note that I have added a handful of additional suggestions to the list below, taken from other documents referenced later in this post.)

Develop a good communications campaign

  • Identify and understand your audience
    • identify the stakeholder group(s) who can affect positive change, what information and analysis they need and how you can help meet their knowledge needs.
    • segment the audience and tailor communications to the specific concerns and needs of different target groups, to make the content as useful and relevant as possible.
    • understand the intended audience’s knowledge and values. Use framing and language that will resonate with target audiences and evolve their understanding of, and contribution to, an issue.
  • Work to identify who the best ‘messengers’ are for your content: Who is most likely to capture the attention of your intended audience?
  • Request audience feedback often, and revise and update messaging, content and engagement activities to improve when things aren’t working well.
  • Learn lessons from previous public information/ advertising campaigns and be prepared to test your assumptions.

Tailor knowledge products and use multiple formats

  • Craft knowledge products and services that frame the information in ways that are tailored and relevant to the stakeholder group(s).
  • Use appropriate language: Translate literally into different languages and/or use more or less technical language according to the target group’s needs.
  • ‘Layer’ the message: Start with simple, eye-catching headlines, and signpost to more complex levels of information and analysis: 5-second read, 60-second read, 10-minute read, 30–60-minute read.
  • Produce diverse formats when the budget allows: Tell the same story, where possible, in multiple formats to cater to people’s varying personal preferences. For example, use text, pictures (picture galleries, photo essays, etc.), slide packs, films and animations, as well as multimedia products that combine all of the above.
  • Make content easy to access, easy to use, easy to share. Make sure content can be readily understood, applied and distributed by your intended audiences.

Recognise how digital and face-to-face communications can amplify each other

  • Devise digital outreach campaigns that elevate serious climate change messages in the midst of huge online ‘chatter’ by using well-tested tactics – such as high-quality imagery, innovative infographics, clear copywriting and even memes – to make content compulsively shareable.
  • Give audiences at face-to-face events (meetings, conferences) the digital tools to spread content to their networks, for an ‘amplifying’ effect on your communications campaign.
  • Combine face-to-face engagements in smaller groups with digital outreach via larger broadcast communications, as a way to achieve both depth and breadth.

Get the climate change framing right: Learn how to develop one or several story angles that will resonate with your target audiences:

> General audiences

  • Find the ‘human interest’ stories – in other words, people’s own words about their own experiences – that tell how climate change has negative impacts.
  • Use the most authoritative statistics and analysis you can find to back up your stories.
  • Find the stories about iconic cultural and historical assets that could be negatively affected by climate change.
  • Look out for the insidious, small-scale impacts of climate change that are weakening people’s resilience over time and affecting their ability to ‘bounce back’ and fulfil their human potential.
  • Highlight that action on adaptation can prevent the loss of livelihoods, assets, health and well-being – even loss of life – from climate change impacts.
  • Show the power of positive solutions. People don’t want just bad news, they want inspiration!

> Business and economics focused audiences

  • Look for examples of risks to company profit – or to a company’s entire business model – posed by climate change impacts on assets, work force, production systems and supply chains.
  • Find the stories of risk to competitiveness – of company, city, region, country – from inattention to climate change impacts.
  • Highlight that action on adaptation can create a resilient firm with long-term prospects for business growth and stability.
  • Demonstrate that assessing climate risks to the business demonstrates a robust vision and strategy to shareholders, aimed at ensuring the firm’s long-term value. It is about being ‘ahead of the curve’.

For more detail of the above recommendations, please see the original document.

A note on the limitations of mass media campaigns

In Talking Climate (2017), Corner and Clarke argue: “Although mass media promotions are often the most cost-effective ways of ‘reaching’ large numbers of people, one-way communications have been most effective when combined with more interpersonal or community-based initiatives to support individuals [e.g. in quitting smoking] and to visibly shift social norms.” Research on the effectiveness of HIV campaigns points to the importance of fostering environments where ‘the voice of those most affected by the pandemic can be heard.” (Panos London 2003.) They conclude that: “Targets are important and necessary, but they should follow (rather than precede) a process of public engagement.” (page 23)[4]

This proposition echoes one given to me by a venerated community drama practitioner, Noel Greig, who told me not long before he died: “It’s all about shoe leather.” What he meant was that there is no replacement for getting out there, having one-to-one conversations and building trust through authentic dialogue. Your community group (like ours here in South Yorkshire) obviously cannot hold one-to-one conversations with every person in the region but I think we should be realise the limitations of remote and generalised forms of communication and we should maximise the opportunities for authentic dialogue in whatever we do.

That said, it is also important to take on board that we now live in a digital world. The social media aspect of communications is not my strength so I would recommend that you look elsewhere if you want further advice to supplement that given above.

In Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning?, I give a few examples of digital and creative approaches to communications. Stephen Duncombe, in particular, makes the point that nowadays many people are ‘prosumers’, not just consumers but producers. In suggesting that authentic, face-to-face conversations should be at the core of our communications ambitions, I may be reflecting the perspective of an older generation. You and your organisation may be well advised to come up with digitally-based projects that will capture the imaginations of the video-game generation.

c: A repository of tips and models for climate communicators (centred on the ‘gradualist’ approach)

In this section, I have gathered principles and tips from a number of different sources,  in the hope that they will be helpful for practitioners on the ground. The sources used largely agree on taking an optimistic approach and avoiding triggering fear, guilt, anxiety and disavowal. As noted above, this section lacks guidance on more confrontational, ‘emergency mobilisation’ tactics.

I have organised the gradualist principles under six roughly chronological but overlapping headings. I was thinking about the process a person might go through with a grassroots organisation or campaigning group, from when they first encounter it through to (perhaps) becoming a committed activist or leader themselves.

  1. Approach: be clear about the intentions and values that run through all of your communications
  2. Engagement: get people’s attention / invite them in
  3. Rapport: connect / build a relationship
  4. Conversation: listen and learn
  5. Messaging: deliver reliable information appropriately / persuade
  6. Empowerment: inspire and enable people to take action
  7. Politicisation: support people into campaigning

Detailed practical tips for politicisation are currently lacking from this post. I hope to fill that section out later. For a discussion of some of the issues around politicisation, please see my post Politicisation: how can climate communicators help people move into campaigning?

1. Approach: be clear about the intentions and values that run through all of your communications

What principles are you working with? What is your theory of change?

Align communication objectives with the overall aims and objectives of the programme

Be clear about the top communications priorities:

  • Breaking the silence and starting the wider conversation is the primary objective of climate communication. This is necessary in order to build the social mandate for the radical changes that are needed.
  • It is more important to establish, build and keep the relationship than it is to get a particular message over. Better that people are engaged but disagree than that they don’t engage at all.

Understand and countermand (a) the psychology of disavowal and (b) the politics of denial.

Adam Corner of Climate Outreach claims that denialism has had its day. There is no point in fighting last year’s battles, he says. But the impacts of denialism are still with us and may surface within our conversations on the ground. Communicators might be well advised to prepare themselves to handle such moments confidently.

Disavowal and denial  

Disavowal.
Disavowal, used in the climate change context, means an attitude of disconnection from the issue of climate change, and how serious it is, and a lack of a sense of responsibility for taking action. Although concern about the climate and nature emergencies has risen exponentially in recent times, we are all still prone to disavowal,  to differing degrees.

Why so?  One explanation advanced by people like George Marshall is that, for most people in developed countries, global warming doesn’t yet feel either urgent or scary, so both politicians and the general population keep putting off taking effective action. The theory is that we human beings evolved to respond to immediate threats. We switch to alarm mode when we hear a sudden danger signal, such as the crack of a twig in the undergrowth or a smell of burning. But climate change isn’t sudden; it’s gradual. It is often invisible. To us, in the global north, it often seems remote, and we cannot easily see what we should do about it. You can’t just point a fire extinguisher at a warming ocean and cool it down in a few seconds. Climate change requires us to use our brains, to look at the gradually accumulating data, predict how things will develop and take preventive actions. It will never feel urgent until it is too late – and we are perilously close to that point now.[5]  

Psychoanalysts such as Sally Weintrobe point to a different possible explanation. Human beings cannot tolerate too much reality, they say. We hide uncomfortable truths from ourselves; we dream of omnipotence and live in denial of our own mortality; global warming triggers ‘annihilation anxiety’.[6] Rosemary Randall emphasises that disavowal has the purpose of trying to protect oneself from such difficult feelings.[7]  

A further possible reason, advanced by Feinberg and Willer in 2011, may be that “dire messages reduce belief in global warming by contradicting just world beliefs.” A just world belief is the belief that everyone ultimately gets what they deserve. These beliefs may be more common in people with conservative, authoritarian political values, and in religious people.[8]

Denial.
The burning of fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal – is the main cause of global heating. There is evidence that some of the corporations that produce fossil fuels have deliberately suppressed accurate information about their impact on the atmosphere. Even now, there are wealthy corporations and individuals spending millions each year to sow confusion about the science of climate change in the media. Climate communicators therefore need to be ready to confront misinformation (errors in understanding), disinformation (incorrect information put out by climate sceptics) and denial (rejection of the whole global warming threat.)  

At the time of writing, in 2021, it seems that explicit denial has become much less socially acceptable. However writers such as Michael Mann warn that the proponents of fossil fuels are still trying to delay action behind-the-scenes, using a range of tactics, including encouraging the view that it is too late to make a difference. Mann calls this ‘inactivism’. Others sometimes use the term ‘delayism.’ It should be noted that some ‘climate sceptics’ reject the term ‘denier’. They believe that their scepticism is founded in good evidence and isn’t just a cynical attempt to maintain fossil fuel profits. Your group will need to decide whether it wishes to engage in such debates or not,  and on what terms. For more on confronting denial, see the box below on ‘Inoculating’ people against denialism’.  

Explain and countermand the psychology of disavowal

Blaming people for their disavowal won’t help at all;  better to explain how natural it is and to design your communications to countermand it as in the table below.

Characteristic of global warming[9]Possible communications response
DistantFind local relevance
HugeBreak global warming down into small components
ComplexAcknowledge the complexity but promote scientifically recognised levers for effective decarbonisation (e.g. reducing beef consumption, using public transport,  insulating homes)
Slow moving and invisibleHelp people to notice changes that are happening now
IntergenerationalEngage with young people whose lives are likely to be directly affected by rising temperatures
Challenges our way of lifeSeek solutions that enable people to have a satisfying, if somewhat different, quality-of-life Ensure that the necessary transition to a sustainable economy is well-planned, well explained and that everybody’s needs are thought about fairly

Proceed with confidence based on scientifically sound information

Surveys show that concern about climate change is now high in developed countries and overt denialism seems to be in retreat.[10] Climate communicators can therefore assume an acceptance of the need for action in the abstract but should recognise that specific decarbonisation objectives will need to be repeatedly explained and justified.

Extinction Rebellion scientists have produced a paper that aims to present the crucial facts about the climate emergency. Even the short version runs to several pages, however, so grassroots climate campaigners will need to select a few key points that they want to emphasise, or bring in at appropriate moments. (Drawing this list up might be an important early job for your comms team.)[11]

Adopt a flexible approach based on continual learning

  • Climate communications is not a perfect science, but an on-going process of learning through doing.
  • Climate communicators should research and learn lessons from previous campaigns (their own and others’).

ii. Engagement: get people’s attention / invite them in[12]

People are more likely to be drawn in by activities that look fun, intriguing, non-threatening and heart-warming.

I include this principle on the basis of personal experience with arts-based projects and festivals. Most people enjoy simple, non-threatening activities such as cutting and sticking, drawing and photographing as well as seeing performances – music, drama, poetry, stand-up or film. It doesn’t always have to be artistic. Many Transition groups have run events such as cider-making days or seed-swap days. In the past, Tupperware parties were very popular with women and Ann Summers parties still take place.

However, Stephen Duncombe warns that engaging younger people in the 21st-century may look very different.[13] He advises communicators to think in terms of video-games and exciting spectacles, and to recognise that many young people are now producers themselves, e.g. with their own YouTube channels. 

With each new person or group, ask yourself ‘What is their entry point?’

  • This includes politicians. (See the advice of Hope for the Future on how to research the interests of your local MP and what might be the best way in to a constructive dialogue with them. https://www.hftf.org.uk/)
  • It can be useful to focus on things people can visualise and care about, e.g. changes in Nature near where they live.

Make and remake a clear contract with each new person or group.

When somebody agrees to engage in an activity, there is always an implicit contract. Communicators should make clear what they are offering or asking for. People will back away if they feel they are being pressurised into something they don’t understand or don’t want to commit to. It is important to gain consent and to regain it regularly. It is easy for people to burn out or feel overwhelmed. This is why Extinction Rebellion has adopted the ambition of developing a ‘regenerative’ internal culture.

Utilize ‘trusted messengers’ and promote new voices to reach beyond the usual suspects.

  • Messengers are often more important than the message.
  • People hear the music not the words; the non-verbal aspects of communication are the most important.
  • Some sections of the population are venomously opposed to people they see as left-leaning, white, middle-class environmentalists. They are more likely to listen to somebody they can identify with, who they believe understands their lives and perspectives.
  • Peer-to-peer approaches are the best; it is worth investing time and money in finding, nurturing and training potential communicators within target areas and communities.
  • Engagement should be targeted at social networks, thus enhancing social capital and increasing the likelihood of peer-to-peer learning.

Including people with conservative values is essential for building effective public engagement.

Climate communicators must embrace those who identify with the centre right and with different faith groups if they are to have a sufficiently wide impact to bring about the new social mandate. For more information on communicating with these groups and others see the excellent guidance documents on the Climate Outreach website.[14]

iii. Rapport: connect / build a relationship

Rapport is a word for when you are ‘in tune’ with somebody – or to use a different metaphor – when you feel you’re ‘walking in step’ with them. Often you can spot from a distance friends who are enjoying each other’s company because they are sitting, standing or walking in similar ways and adopting similar tones of voice, whether laughing together or having an earnest conversation. With some people you have an instant rapport; but in public communications, you will often have to work at it a bit, especially in the first few moments of a conversation. Being warm, open and attentive, and listening respectfully are crucial.

Being in rapport makes a conversation easier – especially a difficult one.

Communications should be tailored to specific audiences, local cultures and local needs:

  • Geert Hofstede has defined culture as “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.”[15] A down-to-earth definition of culture that is often used nowadays is ‘the way we do things around here’.
  • Do careful research into the culture, worldview, values and beliefs of the person or group you are planning to approach.
  • Start from where they are at – their current state of knowledge and their immediate concerns.
  • Climate communicators might want to be aware of such elements of culture as values, language, symbols, heroes and rituals, as well as more salient aspects, such as religion, food and music.

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and align your climate messages with:

  • their values: what is important to them in their lives
  • the specific issues that matter to them
  • their needs

Be sensitive to context, especially the pressures that people are living with

  • Pick your time and place.
  • Be aware of people’s limited ‘worry bank’ (i.e. we can only worry about so many things on any given day!)
  • Be sensitive to the context of the pandemic (2021); this is an uncertain and worrying time.

Choose words carefully to respect and reflect the interests and values of your audience

This is not a matter of trying to manipulate your audience by using ‘magic words’, which would very likely seem inauthentic. It is more a matter of knowing which words not to use – words that might come over as disrespectful or patronising or which might sound like the vocabulary of a different social group.

Hope for the Future: Apply the above principles to politicians too!

Hope for the Future is an organisation that advises and trains constituents in how to most effectively lobby their local MP around climate change.[16] Their approach is based on Non-Violent Communication (NVC) which emphasises the building of empathy through understanding the other person’s fundamental psychological, physical, social and spiritual needs, such as appreciation, safety, respect, choice and inspiration.[17] They run training courses on their approach which has been effective in building relationships even with politicians who are apparently opposed to action on climate change.

They emphasise the importance of doing research beforehand, going in with the intention of building the relationship, and having a range of ‘asks’ in mind which are things that the person could reasonably do, starting from something very simple that aligns with one of their own priorities. If you want to write to or visit an MP, Hope for the Future can help you with the preparatory research and can even advise you on the best approach.  

Communications should be sensitive to gender and other protected characteristics

Sensitivity to gender is crucial not only when approaching some faith groups but there can be gender-based differences in attitudes to the technical aspects of cutting your carbon footprint e.g. in my experience of running Carbon Conversations groups, the men and women sometimes had different entry points and interests. This is just one aspect of a much larger discussion about being respectful of different groups, and sensitive to the pressures they may be under, including economic and social discrimination in their various forms. At a global level, it is worth noting that the Project Drawdown suggests that the education of girls may be one of the most important decarbonisation strategies, as educated women tend to have fewer children, thus slowing down population growth.[18]

If you have never done any training in unconscious bias, it might be a good thing to do – though I would recommend seeking out a highly experienced and empathetic trainer as this can be quite a challenging experience.

Public engagement should start from people’s values.

People are motivated by shared values and identity, and the joy of belonging. People hear only what confirms their beliefs so they need to hear:

  • This is who you are (someone who cares about these things)
  • Other people like you agree with this/you
  • When you embrace this you belong more to your group (not less)
  • And the world becomes more how you want it to be (not less)[19]
Some notes on speaking to an audience’s values, taken from a presentation by George Marshall from Climate Outreach at the University of Sheffield,  November 2017.  

Consider both the language you use and the narrative you tell.  

FAITH: Use language that works across the five faiths: e.g.
·      The world is a precious gift
·      Climate change is a moral challenge
·      We care for the poor and vulnerable
·      We preserve the legacy of our parents
·      We provide for the future for our children
·      The world is out of balance; climate change is a message that something is wrong.
·      We need action at all levels  

TRADE UNIONS: “Climate change is the biggest social justice issue of all time. We’ve sat out this issue and let it be dominated by middle class environmentalists. We need to be involved and doing what we do best – we need to stand together to protect our communities and our jobs!” [solidarity]

Case Study: Southern US Christians
The audience: conservative evangelical Christians
Values:Biblical truth, responsibility, protect innocents, not-liberal, not-green  

Case Study: Preventing litter
The audience: general public but especially young disaffected men
Values: male pride, tough, macho, anti-authority, defensive/insecure, peer pressure    

Because people hold very different values, mixed groups can be hard to handle; look for shared ‘communal’ values or a common enabling narrative.

  • Communal values that cross party-political divides might be such things as a concern for nature or a dislike of waste.
  • The Common Cause Foundation have led the way in the UK in researching values. They distinguish between extrinsic values which rely on external approval or rewards – such as wealth, power or public image and intrinsic values such as community, love for friends and family and creativity. They have also researched kindness as an important value to promote across the political spectrum.[20]
Segmenting your audience: Britain Talks Climate  

George Marshall and Climate Outreach have undertaken research with a variety of social groups, seeking to understand their values and perspectives and exploring which climate messages chime with them (if at all.) Their reports cover the Centre Right, faith groups, young people, rural councillors, work in Europe, Tunisia, India, Canada, etc.: https://climateoutreach.org/reports/  

Directly relevant to grassroots communications planning in the UK is Climate Outreach’s 2020 survey, Britain Talks Climate, which segmented the UK population into seven groups or attitudes who could well be considered when planning particular projects or campaigns:

Progressive Activists – Vocal and passionate, politically active but pessimistic about the direction society has taken, climate change is central to Progressive Activists’ identity and politics. They are despairing about governments’ moral failings on the issue, which they believe will make all other challenges and inequalities worse.

Backbone Conservatives – Conservative, patriotic and optimistic, Backbone Conservatives take pride in tangible success stories about British environmental achievements and care deeply about food, farming and the rural economy. But they are more sceptical about grand claims of global leadership, or the ‘virtue signalling’ of (what they sometimes see as) symbolic lifestyle changes.

Civic Pragmatists – Moderate and tolerant, Civic Pragmatists are anxious about the future, with climate change contributing to that fear. They try to follow a low-carbon lifestyle, but feel demotivated by a lack of political ambition on climate change and other social issues. Reflecting their pragmatic nature, they are likely to look past their opinion of the government of the day and support progressive climate policies when they see them.

Established Liberals – Confident and comfortable, Established Liberals have a global outlook driven more by their professional networks than a sense of solidarity with communities around the world. They don’t necessarily view climate change as something that will affect them personally, but they do want to hear how low-carbon solutions will drive economic resilience and growth.

Disengaged Battlers – Feeling unheard and unrepresented, Disengaged Battlers are nevertheless broadly convinced of the need to take action on climate change. However, they do not yet believe the transition will benefit them, and are too busy surviving from day to day to give it more of their attention.

Disengaged Traditionalists – Disillusioned and sceptical, Disengaged Traditionalists recognise tangible environmental risks like air pollution, but are far from ‘sold’ on the need for action on climate. They are more likely to see it as a problem for foreign governments to deal with.

Loyal Nationals – Traditional and proud to be British, Loyal Nationals feel threatened and are galvanised by issues such as crime, immigration and terrorism. They believe the UK is already living with the reality of climate change, but they understand it as an issue linked to localised (rather than global) inequality and environmental degradation. Their relatively high political participation is driven by moral outrage about a system that supports corporate greed over everyday working people.[21]  

iv. Conversation: listen and learn

Climate conversations can be spontaneous or planned, short or long. They don’t have to be ‘big picture’, they can be about all kinds of small related topics e.g. “Could you ever give up cheese?”

Listen and have genuine dialogue [22]

The #Talking Climate Handbook produced by Climate Outreach proposes the mnemonic REAL TALK as a set of guidelines for holding productive climate conversations:

  • Respect your conversational partner and find common ground
  • Enjoy the conversation
  • Ask questions
  • Listen, and show you’ve heard
  • Tell your story
  • Action makes it easier (but doesn’t fix it)
  • Learn from the conversation
  • Keep going and keep connected

For shorter training sessions, I have used just the first four letters – REAL (which may be more memorable too.)

It may help your climate conversations to have a cue sheet

In the Climate Communications Hub in Sheffield, we have developed a foldable pocket ‘cue sheet’ to support people with initiating and structuring climate conversations. First collated by Tim Allen coming out of our group conversations, it has evolved over time, e.g. Thame COP took it and adapted it for their community engagement programme in the lead-up to the COP 26 conference in 2021. You may find it useful to adapt too.

The climate conversations cue card we developed in Sheffield, adapted by Thame COP for its ‘community researcher’ project. It can help to have a loose framework in mind, especially if you are having a planned conversation.

Authenticity is critical for building trust

  • Tell the real stories of real people, not PR spin.
  • Tell your own story of concern. Strong communication says who you are, what you care about. Use ‘I’ to make it personal. Why is this important to you? What are your own feelings about the climate emergency? What do you find difficult about reducing your own footprint? How have your own views changed over time?
  • It is important to be authentic, but your communication probably won’t go down well if you are currently feeling desperate or hopeless; better to let somebody else do it (and get some help for yourself.)
  • Vocalise your thoughts about climate change; talk about the things that you are doing to reduce your own carbon footprint.
  • Stories of and from people who have experienced the front line of climate change can be very powerful in bringing the reality of it home.

“Stay with the trouble”[23]

  • Be ready to have tricky conversations e.g. about eating less meat and dairy or travelling differently.
  • When people express views different from yours, take them seriously; ask questions, listen and avoid blaming. The Braver Angels program in the USA offers some very helpful resources in this respect. One of their guidelines is to ‘Connect before you disagree’ (which is another way to say ‘build rapport.’)[24]
  • Take on board Hope for the Future’s advice about talking to politicians: engage them in conversation, don’t just give them a presentation. But do ask difficult questions. Reject ‘stealth strategies’ (when politicians say they would rather address climate change behind-the-scenes); ask them to make the issue upfront and explicit.
  • Based on her psychotherapeutic experience,  Rosemary Randall warns that you may have to deal with ‘projections’ onto you, people saying you’re trying to make them feel guilty. She suggests using the technique of reflecting their comments back to them, e.g. “You seem to see me as a kill-joy! I don’t like that.”

Where appropriate, help people to develop their skills in thinking critically

The literature on climate communications repeatedly emphasises the non-rational nature of human beings and the primacy of emotion. But this does not mean that there is no place for rational argument or for challenging logically invalid arguments. The challenge is to do this with sensitivity and rapport.

When trying to connect understand and connect with people’s worldviews, Critical Thinking practice is good to fall back on. Good practice, led by a  spirit of generosity, revolves around trying to understand (‘reconstruct’) your opponent’s argument before you propose a different point of view.[25]

George Lakoff has written extensively about political values. It might be worth noting that he claims that some people are attracted to the right because it seems to assert a straightforward morality and it engages powerful emotions such as anger and pride; in contrast, the left, he says, comes across as intellectual and equivocating.[26] If you agree with him, you might want to think about keeping your messages simple and direct, with a strong emotional appeal.

v. Messaging: deliver reliable information appropriately / persuade

A range of placards at demonstrations. What exactly do they want observers to understand or do? How helpful would such messages be for people in your target community?
What do we mean by a ‘message’?

I put together this checklist based on a quick internet search. Brief as it is, I think it makes some important distinctions.[27]

Marketing messaging represents how a brand communicates to its customers and highlights the value of its products. “Messages” refer to not only the actual words and phrases used by a brand in advertising but also the feelings and emotions associated with what they say.

A political message is a short, truthful statement that lays out for voters why they should vote for you. Crafting and consistently using a compelling message is essential to persuading targeted voters to vote for you.

What then is a climate message? By extension of the above definitions, a climate message could be said to be a short, compelling statement that persuades citizens to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
 

This is relatively straightforward when we are aiming to promote specific behaviour changes. However, we know that the climate and nature emergencies are complex and our messaging is complicated by needing to break through the insidious, multilayered veils of disavowal and denial. So our climate messages may also be about informing, educating, encouraging or provoking thought. And even when a person is reasonably well-informed and reasonably – or even passionately – committed to taking action, there are many questions about which kind of action would be best to take, and bewildered citizens may welcome advice about risks, realities and relative impacts.
 
It is said that the test of a good political message comes when a campaigner can give a concise, persuasive reply to the question, “Why should I vote for you?” With specific decarbonising behaviour changes, there is a clear parallel. We need to have succinct, persuasive replies to such questions as: Why should I drive less? Why should I eat less meat?
 
But we might also need answers to questions such as: How do we know for sure? Why should I be bothered if their island goes underwater? How am I supposed to get to work if I don’t use the car? Isn’t it all too late anyway?

Realise that behaviour is complex.

Climate communication is not simply a matter of stating facts clearly; it means engaging with emotions, beliefs, values, etc.

Accept that giving correct information is crucial but, on its own, it is not enough.

It may even be counter-productive, serving only to provoke people to defend their incorrect views. However, feeling confident about the key facts may help people to engage in conversations about the climate emergency. Many people worry that they do not know enough or do not understand the science. This was one of the points made by students feeding back on the pilot climate conversations course I ran at the University of Sheffield in December 2020 and points to the value of providing Carbon Literacy training. (See box below.)

Focus on key messages

  • Simple messages that connect with daily life
  • You don’t need much data (too much data can be off-putting)
  • Promote local activities that will make a difference to the global challenge. This combination is more likely to promote self efficacy: on the one hand the activity is local and therefore accessible; on the other hand, it seems worthwhile in the bigger picture.

In addition, I would suggest that behaviour change messages should:

  • be scientifically sound
  • seem realistic/feasible
  • make sustainable behaviours seem easy and the ‘new normal’
  • be encouraging
  • appear fair
  • address disavowal (seek to make climate change salient and relevant)
  • promote communal values and/or be tailored to specific groups
  • communicate both urgency and agency
  • seek to provoke critical thinking and dialogue
  • be aligned with your organisation’s long-term strategy
  • and ideally be imaginative too.

Produce your own list of pertinent information messages

We discovered when practising and facilitating climate conversations through the Climate Communications Hub in Sheffield that people often felt insecure about their level of knowledge. So, in terms of information messages, your group might consider producing a ‘crib-sheet’ of key facts – perhaps sorted into ‘good news’ and ‘bad news’ and definitely made as relevant as possible to your target audience and your locality.

Sense when people are glazing over

Rosemary Randall points out that people switch off when they reach information overload (which could be after a sentence or two!) At this point, they need help to process what they have heard. If you don’t stop and give them time to do that, you may lose them for the rest of the session.[28]

Always test your messages (with both supporter and opponent audiences.)

Carbon Literacy  

In theory, it is good for people to know the basic facts about global warming (and to correct any misinformation they may have.) The Carbon Literacy Project therefore proposes that every citizen should have one day’s training covering these essential points:
·      What greenhouse gases are, and their relationship to weather and climate
·      How climate here and elsewhere is likely to change, and how we know this
·      How changes in the climate are likely to affect us in our region, in the UK and in other parts of the world
·      How our actions impact on the amount of greenhouse gases produced and the impact that they have
·      What we can do to reduce our impact and the benefits and disadvantages of taking action
·      What we are already doing locally and nationally
·      Where we can go to get help
·      How we can motivate others to take action, including gaining the confidence to express our Carbon Literacy to others  

Phil Korbel, one of the project’s founders, says that citizens need all three of: awareness, ability and motivation. However, he and his colleagues emphasise that carbon literacy training should be delivered in ways compatible with the rest of this document e.g. tailored to the particular group and/or organisation – their interests and needs, delivered in an engaging, interactive way and ideally delivered by peers.  

Those who have completed the training get a certificate which means that there is a certain formality about it and it can work well to deliver it in workplace settings, especially when the standard content is made relevant to that organisation or business. (I think of it as being like ‘doing your First Aid.’)  

The Carbon Literacy Project has produced free training materials for public sector organisations such as universities and is currently exploring the possibility of creating a similar module for community-based training.[29]   Recently it announced a new partnership with a consortium of trainers called Speak Carbon whose role will be to train trainers in order to spread carbon literacy more widely.[30]  

Be wary of abstract nouns / define your terms

When designing messages and giving presentations, climate communicators would be well advised to consider whether the meanings that they give to certain words or phrases might be differently received by their audience. For example, two key words in political discourse are ‘freedom’ and ‘fairness’. These are understood differently by the political right and the political left. One way round this might be to explain your own meaning and/or to ask the audience what they understand by contentious words.

Contextualise individual behaviour change so as to avoid individual blaming

Individual behaviours matter, but only as part of a more integrated and holistic approach, where personal actions have a clear relationship to the bigger picture on energy and climate change.

Relate the day-to-day questions to a bigger purpose and vision

  • Build a shared sense of purpose by asking about the future: how can we live differently and better in ways that meet the need for CO2 reduction?
  • Put climate change in a wider context. The media still tend to see the climate emergency as a self-contained topic not as systemic. In all climate communications, we can make clear how the climate and ecological emergency is affecting every industrial sector and every aspect of our lives.[31]

Make climate science meaningful

  • Tell stories and anecdotes, rather than presenting graphs and statistics
  • Talk about the real world, not abstract ideas
  • Translate scientific language and use no acronyms
  • Use familiar concepts to help people understand science and statistics
  • Adapt the narrative to the group[32]

Bring the climate emergency close to home

  • Make climate change “us, here and now”; not “them, there and then.”

Use images and stories to make climate change real and human

  • Communicate on a human scale
  • Talk about what is already happening
  • Use attractive images
  • Use images that inspire and empower
  • Show people, not pie charts
  • Use multi-pronged strategies
  • Use video games and digital technologies
  • Use storytelling to strengthen engagement

For more on using stories, digital technology and creativity to engage both ordinary citizens and politicians, see my post Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning?

Give clear messages about the most effective actions for ordinary citizens to take  

Climate communicators should ensure they are disseminating clear messages about which actions make the biggest contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It is easy for people to get confused about which sources of greenhouse gases are actually the worst and therefore which actions are most effective to take.  

Very commonly, when asked about climate change, people will quickly talk about recycling. Now, Greening Steyning near Brighton have decided to accept this is where people are at, so they run days for people to bring all their recycling into a centre and put it in different bins. The days are popular and serve as a way to make contact with new people, which is great for engagement!

However, the bald reality is that, whilst recycling is an important aspect of developing a circular economy, it will not bring about significant reductions in carbon emissions. The urgent task is to rapidly reduce the greenhouse gases that are being pumped into the atmosphere, preferably to zero.  

Broadly speaking, I see four main strategies to achieve this, that I think it would be helpful for all citizens to be aware of:

Drastically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the biggest polluters, such as the energy, cement, steel and beef industries.

Change the infrastructure around us, such as transport and buildings, moving away from systems that produce greenhouse gases.

Maximise carbon sinks. Call for radical conservation and restoration policies for natural carbon sinks, as well as exploring the possibilities of carbon capture and storage through artificial means.

Persuade ordinary people to change their behaviours in ways that might be small in themselves but would make a big cumulative difference if everybody did them.  

All four strategies will have more success if governments take the lead. We need massive structural changes if we are to get from ‘two-planet living’ to ‘one-planet living.’ Only governments can pass laws to make emissions reductions compulsory and to create a ‘level playing field’ for businesses. They can also set up systems that will incentivise change (such as taxing carbon emitting industries or providing subsidies to encourage householders to insulate their houses and cut their energy use.)  

However, MPs who want to take action on climate change say they can only do so when they have enough constituents pestering them to do so. So when we are talking to people about what they can do, actually one of the most effective things would be for them to put pressure on their MP and local councillors to pass laws that require or incentivise reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.[33]  

Another meaningful thing that they can do is to set an example in their own lifestyle and encourage family, friends, neighbours and colleagues to follow suit. If nothing else, they/we can help to create what Climate Outreach calls a ‘social mandate’ for change by getting as many people as possible talking about the issues.  

Many books and websites recommend specific actions that ordinary citizens can take. My own list of the five most decarbonising actions, in addition to political action, that people can take is:
1.     Switch your energy supplier to one that uses only renewable energy.
2.     Better insulate your home and turn your heating down.
3.     Eat less meat and dairy foods.
4.     Drive less; walk and cycle more.
5.     Fly less or not at all.  

However, Keith Allott, Director (Power Transition) at the European Climate Foundation gave me a different list when I interviewed him (in 2014.) He saw individual behaviour change as a distraction and said the most important changes to get people to support were strategic, e.g.
·       Accept new technology (e.g. wind farms)
·       Get out of coal
·       Divest pensions from fossil fuels
·       Learn about the relative impacts of different sources of emissions

Margaret Klein Salamon (Climate Mobilisation) also emphasises the systemic nature of the problem. The over-riding message she promotes is to call for a “World War II scale transformation of the economy and society.” (For a full discussion of her viewpoint, see my post ‘Emergency mobilisation’: the heated debate about the harnessing of uncomfortable feelings – and some possible solutions.)  

And not everybody may understand that, as well as reducing our own emissions of carbon dioxide, we need to be adding, maintaining and increasing natural carbon sinks, including oceans, peat bogs and woodlands. Similarly, it is crucial that we preserve the Amazonian rainforest, the so-called ‘lungs of the planet’. This is where the ecological and climate emergencies compound each other and need to be tackled together. Again, most of what needs to be done is at the larger scale, national and international, but ordinary citizens can call for radical conservation and restoration policies, and landowners can model good practice.  

Finally, I note that fashion blogger, Alden Wicker, points out that many actions recommended for individuals to take as ‘conscious consumers’ (in order to reduce their carbon footprints) are little more than gestures. What counts, she says, is politically led infrastructural change.[34]  

Develop your self awareness

  • Reflect on your own values and influences, how you came to hold the beliefs and views that you do.
  • Be aware that your own biases and hidden agendas may come over implicitly, undermining the messages you are attempting to convey.
  • Avoid ‘green’ messaging when speaking to ‘non-greens’. (It’s not their identity.)

Practise what you preach

Climate Outreach says: “People taking action in their personal lives are more likely to persuade others that wider change is needed. When interacting with others, people tend to strongly dislike it if they think someone else is being inconsistent or hypocritical. Climate communicators, advocates and researchers are seen as more convincing — and their advice more likely to be acted upon — if they themselves pursue low-carbon lifestyles.”

Approach scepticism carefully

  • Understand why some people doubt climate change.
  • Acknowledge genuine uncertainty, but do show what you know.
  • If you have good trust and rapport, you may be able to engage people in reflecting critically on their own and others’ arguments; without trust and rapport, all you can do is disagree politely but firmly.
  • Learn how to inoculate people against misinformation, disinformation and denial.
‘Inoculating’ people against denialism  

John Cook has produced a number of resources about how best to spot climate science denial. He bases his approach in critical thinking practice and uses the mnemonic FLICC:
Fake experts
Logical fallacies
Impossible expectations
Cherry picking
Conspiracy theories  

He suggests that the best response to somebody who has been seduced by misinformation, disinformation or denial is to ‘inoculate’ them by explaining these five tactics used by denialists.

More details can be found on his website, in his graphic book ‘Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change” and in the Cranky Uncle app. https://skepticalscience.com/history-FLICC-5-techniques-science-denial.htmlhttps://crankyuncle.com/  

It may be of interest to some that Cook’s approach seems opposed to that of George Lakoff who claims that contesting your opponent’s argument is usually counter-productive, you just give air time to their position and you never change their point of view. I think the distinction is that Cook isn’t getting drawn into all the pros and cons of the ‘evidence’ or arguments put forward by climate sceptics; instead he is explaining the tactics they are using.

The climate scientist, Michael Mann, claims that a surplus of misinformation is more of a problem than a deficit of good information. Although many denialists have now abandoned outright denial, their strategy is to discourage action, to promote ‘inactivism’. Mann says that campaigners need to call this strategy out and take bad faith politicians to task.

He is also suspicious of techno-optimism, as exemplified by Bill Gates in his recent book.[35] He accuses Gates of advocating “dangerous prescriptions and supposed solutions which assume a continuation of business as usual rather than the dramatic and immediate transition off fossil fuels that we actually need.”[36]  

With sensitivity, build on people’s learning from the Covid 19 pandemic

The opportunity of the current unusual situation (2020-21) may be that people are already living outside established norms and may therefore be more open to seeing things differently. When talking to people, it may be possible to draw parallels between the pandemic and the climate emergency e.g. some threats can grow exponentially if rapid action isn’t taken; governments can move rapidly when they need to, including finding money; just as it is hard to prevent an infection from spreading in a globalised world, so global warming crosses all state boundaries; etc. [37] However sensitivity is required to prevent this from seeming tasteless or manipulative.

Public speaking and rhetoric.

In both this and the next section I would ideally have more advice on public speaking skills, rhetoric and persuasion. If you would like to direct me to some concise relevant resources, please contact me at nuttgensclimate@outlook.com.[38]

vi. Empowerment: inspire and enable people to take action

Be positive

  • Be optimistic (crazily so, says environmentalist, Aaron Thierry!)
  • Give inspiring examples of innovative thinking and successful projects
  • Present the fight as winnable
  • Don’t guilt-trip, panic or overwhelm people

If people remain pessimistic, tell them that:

  • Climate scientists such as Michael Mann say there is “still time to make sure it doesn’t get much worse“. When describing where we are at, the appropriate analogy is not a cliff edge, he says; it is better to think of it as a dangerous highway that we have to get off as soon as we can. If we don’t get off at 1.5°, we need to try to get off at 1.6° or 1.7°.
  • The situation is indeed challenging but even if the chance of success is small it is a moral imperative for us to go for it, to make it more likely.[39]

Be action oriented

  • Help people know what they can do
  • Help people to connect with others through doing interesting and useful things together – possibly outdoors, in the natural world
  • Promote activities where people can see a tangible result
  • Promote self efficacy (agency) – help people to believe that they can make a difference
  • Support national and community initiatives which are changing the rules, trying to do things differently

Lead with solutions and benefits

  • Tell people about exciting new technological developments: “Have you heard about…?”
  • Highlight the benefits and co-benefits of taking action (e.g. active travel – walking and cycling – brings health benefits as well as reducing emissions from vehicles)
  • Ask questions that look to a positive future, e.g. “How would you like the world to be in 20 years’ time?”

Make behaviour change easy and rewarding

  • Suggest simple actions with genuine impact
  • Make climate-friendly choices the default option (e.g. at events)
  • Highlight the “green Joneses” i.e. that lots of other people are making changes too
  • Incentivise behaviour with appropriate rewards – including fun

Be realistic

  • … about what you/we can do within our sphere of influence.
  • …about what our target population can do within their sphere of influence.
  • Think in terms of individual actions making a contribution to a society-wide cultural shift over time / being part of a movement.
  • Promote the concept of the ‘activist’s sweet spot’: take actions (1) that you have the skills for, (2) that will make a difference, (3) that are feasible for you, and (4) you would enjoy taking.
  • Prioritise target groups (e.g. faith communities) who are more likely to write or speak to their MPs.
  • Be kind to yourself.

Be aware that people have different levels of agency in relationship to decarbonisation,

e.g. many people do not own their own homes. Even people who have some kind of political, financial or social power have limited influence and they, like the rest of us, are human beings prone to disavowal. Whatever the audience, therefore, actions should only be recommended after consideration of the situation of that audience and the possible obstacles to their taking particular actions.

Think in terms of a ladder or progression in understanding and engagement and plan accordingly.

It might be useful to find or create a model for approaching people with different levels of understanding, engagement or responsibility. This might correspond to the population segmentation in Climate Outreach’s Britain Talks Climate report, for example. Or it may be, that in approaching an MP, using the Hope for the Future model, the initial ‘ask’  is moderate and later ‘asks’ are more challenging.

Climate Outreach’s research shows that “more people undertake low impact individual environmental behaviours in their lives (like recycling or turning off lights), than high-impact behaviours (like eating a plant-based diet or avoiding flying)… People may be undertaking small behaviour change actions not because they think it is the best answer to climate change, but because they can see no other way of reflecting their beliefs and values in their day to day lives. If they can access the knowledge, community support and confidence, they may be prepared to take more significant actions… Once someone adopts a more difficult behaviour, they are also then more likely to adopt other significant impactful behaviours.[40]

‘Communicating lifestyle change (a chapter in the UNEP Emissions Gap Report)’ gives more detail and can be found on the Climate Outreach website.[41]

Channel the power of groups / social norms

People are motivated by sharing and belonging.

  • Mobilize social groups and networks
  • Focus on ‘communal’  rather than ‘self focused’  values.
  • Get kids in on the game
  • Engage Conservatives and people of faith
  • Exclude nobody; we really are all in this together.

Shift from ‘nudge’ to ‘think’ in order to build ‘climate citizenship’

Campaigns focusing on ‘simple and painless’  behaviour changes, such as switching off lights, have not lead to more significant lifestyle changes. Climate Outreach says that social marketing based strategies like the ‘nudge’ approach have not lead to sustained changes in behaviour because they do not involve people reflecting on why the changes matter. Instead, they encourage climate communicators to promote participatory conversations that build a sense of climate citizenship.

Present individual and systemic change as symbiotic / be a model yourself

  • While it is true that we need policymakers to lead on requiring and incentivising structural change systemic change, individual awareness and behaviours contribute to the cultural shift needed to support those policies. Small-scale personal and community actions help people to engage with the larger project;  denigrating them is disempowering.
  • Personal lifestyle changes by climate communicators also convey a sense of authenticity, they restore a sense of integrity when communicating with others.[42]
Carbon Conversations  

Carbon Conversations is an approach to climate education that centres on the idea of supportive group work. Founded in 2006 by psychotherapist Rosemary Randall, Carbon Conversations takes a ‘psycho-social’ approach. Members of a local community meet as a group for six sessions of two hours, over a number of weeks. The groups “combine exploratory participative learning with psychological understanding of how people deal with difficult issues and make changes.”[62]

The group members discuss different aspects of decarbonisation, such as home energy, travel and shopping; they play board games that help them to explore the topic more fully in an engaging way; and they make action plans for reducing their own carbon footprints.

Randall emphasises five principles of the project:
·       The importance of the personal
·       The necessity of connection
·       The power of creativity
·       The richness of diversity
·       The translation of the technical  

These five principles align well with the approach adopted by many grassroots climate groups. Here I would like to emphasise the second principle: we are trying to bring about a cultural shift, to establish new social norms, and to do that you have to connect with others. Consciously or unconsciously, people look to the messages in the society around them as to what is acceptable. Grappling with the information and the challenges of the climate emergency becomes easier if you have the solidarity that comes from being with others. It seems to me that climate communicators at the grassroots should always think in terms of nurturing solidarity, of supporting and developing cohesive community groups, rather than trying to persuade individuals.

That said, it is my own view that not everybody wants to join a ‘course’ or a ‘psycho-social’ group and that many of the messages we need to put over can happen through pro-environmental activities which are less explicit.  

Carbon Conversations remains a wonderful model and a great reference point. The course textbook, In Time For Tomorrow, is an excellent resource for climate education projects.[63]

The challenges with the course itself, I have found, are (a) recruitment and (b) wariness about deep psychological work. The groups I have run have worked best when they grew out of an existing community organisation or faith community and when they focused on practicalities. But I have never run one that dug in very deep.  

Curiously, the one session that got nearest was when none of the women in the group turned up and we had an impromptu men’s group for the evening. I agreed with the men not to proceed with the course materials that evening but rather just to talk about where each of us was at in a relationship to the climate emergency. And then we did have a quite deep conversation. What are the lessons here? That excellent materials such as Carbon Conversations has produced provide a safe, containing structure, but they might also prevent wholehearted reflection and self-disclosure; that the men had built up enough trust by then to feel safe to open up; and that a skilled facilitator knows how to use the materials as a springboard for deeper discussions.[43]

vii. Politicisation: support people into campaigning

I don’t feel that I have enough experience here to include a section of practical tips. What I have done is to explore some ideas and references in a separate post: Politicisation: how can climate communicators help people move into campaigning?

Notes


[1] Developing a communications strategy (NVCO): https://knowhow.ncvo.org.uk/campaigns/communications/communications-strategy#

[2] Keith Allott is critical of activists and campaigners who do things but don’t actually know what result they want to get. (See my post Politicisation: how can climate communicators help people to move into campaigning?)

[3] Dupar, Mairi. (2019.) Communicating climate change: A practitioner’s guide. Insights from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Climate and Development Knowledge Network. Downloadable from:  https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/Communicating%20climate%20change_Insights%20from%20CDKNs%20experience.pdf

[4] Corner, Adam and Clarke,  Jamie. (2017) Talking Climate, From Research to Practice in Public Engagement. Oxford, Palgrave.

[5] Marshall, George. (2014.) Don’t Even Think About It. New York, Bloomsbury Publishing.

[6] Weintrobe, Sally (ed.) (2013) Engaging with Climate Change, psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives. Hove. Routledge.

[7] Beyond optimism or doom: How can we communicate the need for urgent climate action? XR Scientists webinar April 7th 2021

[8] Quoted in Connor, Paul. (2014)  Climate change communication: Key psychological research findings (and why you haven’t heard about them yet). http://www.climatecodered.org/2014/04/climate-change-communication-key_14.html

[9] This list is based on George Marshall’s seminal book on climate communications, Don’t Even Think About It: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18594475-don-t-even-think-about-it

[10] Recent surveys (2021) show that public awareness of climate change is high and a majority of people in the UK want to see the government taking action. See Britain Talks Climate launch webinar: researcher Adam Corner says, ”Climate denialism is really dwindling” (38 mins) https://climateoutreach.org/media/britain-talks-climate/

[11] Emergency on Planet Earth – Overview & Key Facts:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1twGDWTlRihMoShwXDTW0lItXnfwdo2U-miSSsOAl2wE/edit

[12] In From What Is to What If (2019) gives an example of the creative workshop methods of Ruth Ben Tovim. It was from Ruth and her colleague Trish O’Shea that I learned this concept of ‘inviting’ people in. It’s a homey, welcoming idea – not pressuring.

[13] See my post Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning?

[14] https://climateoutreach.org/programmes/communities/page/3/?content=report-and-guide

[15] Hofstede, Geert. (1994) Cultures and Organizations; Intercultural Cooperation and its Importance for Survival. London. HarperCollins Business.

[16] Hope for the Future: https://www.hftf.org.uk/ For NVC see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication

[17] Rosenberg, Marshall. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Accessed at: https://www.cnvc.org/training/resource/book-chapter-1

[18] Project Drawdown: https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions

[19] Process laid out by George Marshall, University of Sheffield, November 2017.

[20] https://commoncausefoundation.org/

[21] https://climateoutreach.org/britain-talks-climate/summary/

[22] The #Talking Climate Handbook downloadable at: https://climateoutreach.org/resources/how-to-have-a-climate-change-conversation-talking-climate/

[23] Donna Haraway quoted in: Willis, Rebecca. (2020) Too Hot To Handle? The Democratic Challenge of Climate Change. Bristol. Bristol University Press.

[24] Braver Angels focuses on transcending Republican/Democrat polarisation in the USA,  not specifically on the climate emergency.  However, the skills it teaches looks very useful for us too. Membership is very cheap and  they offer free/cheap training and free recordings of debates that they run. See: https://braverangels.org/

[25] For a short description of Critical Thinking see: https://www.skillsyouneed.com/learn/critical-thinking.html. A fuller description can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking. A good introductory text is Critical Thinking, The Basics by Stuart Hanscomb (Routledge 2017.)

[26] E.g. (2002). Moral Politics, How Liberal and Conservatives Think. London. University of Chicago Press. Note that Stephen Pinker doesn’t buy Lakoff’s thesis at all: https://newrepublic.com/article/77730/block-metaphor-steven-pinker-whose-freedom-george-lakoff

[27] I found the following websites helpful:

[28] Beyond optimism or doom: How can we communicate the need for urgent climate action? XR Scientists webinar April 7th 2021

[29] https://carbonliteracy.com/toolkits/universities-colleges/

[30] Speak Carbon https://www.speakcarbon.earth/?gclid=CjwKCAjw07qDBhBxEiwA6pPbHmlpgpEry1xx4pM9iCMnnofR18CnAsWHMwQShnUvioqHCzc2FrmDrhoCc4wQAvD_BwE

[31] Beyond optimism or doom: How can we communicate the need for urgent climate action? XR Scientists webinar April 7th 2021

[32] Many of the recommendations in this section are taken from Connecting on Climate, A Guide to Effective Climate Communication (2014) by Eco-America: http://ecoamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ecoAmerica-CRED-2014-Connecting-on-Climate.pdf

[33] I am fully aware that I am describing working within the mainstream. In fact, as I write this, the international COP26 conference has just come to a close with a widespread feeling of disappointment that the world’s governments haven’t gone far enough. There is a feeling amongst activists, as Greta Thunberg has said, “Change is not going to come from inside there [the official conference].” (Nov 1, 2021) So I’m not saying that putting pressure on your local MP and councillors is the only effective action to take and I completely accept that protest and direct action are also needed, along with the training up of skilled and committed leaders for the future. I am also aware that there is a wider – and worrying – debate under way about the limitations of democracy as we know it. At one of the COP 26 events, Prof.Herman E. Ott, a former politician in Germany and now a climate activist, asserted that democratic politics does not allow the radical action that the climate emergency demands because not enough people will vote for any government that takes it. My response to that gloomy proposition is to say (a) let’s improve the quality of our democracy (b) let’s improve the quality of our campaigning, drawing citizens into collaborative critical thinking whenever and wherever possible. (ECOCIDE LAW AND CLIMATE JUSTICEPartner event at COP26 – 52mins in: https://www.stopecocide.earth/cop-events/ecocide-law-and-climate-justice)

[34] Wicker, Alden. (2017.) Conscious consumerism is a lie. Here’s a better way to help save the world. Accessed 05.03.21 at:

https://qz.com/920561/conscious-consumerism-is-a-lie-heres-a-better-way-to-help-save-the-world/

[35] Gates, Bill. (2021) How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, the solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need. Penguin Random House UK.

[36] Beyond optimism or doom: How can we communicate the need for urgent climate action? XR Scientists webinar April 7th 2021

[37] See Climate Outreach. Communicating climate change during the Covid-19 crisis (May 2020). https://climateoutreach.org/reports/communicating-climate-during-covid-19/

[38] A useful resource on writing and designing an effective short talk is Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo (2014.)

[39] Margaret Klein Salamon at Beyond optimism or doom: How can we communicate the need for urgent climate action? XR Scientists webinar April 7th 2021

[40] https://climateoutreach.org/reports/linking-individual-action-system-change-climate-advocacy/#

[41] https://climateoutreach.org/reports/unep-communicating-lifestyle-change/#

[42] Randall and Capstick in Beyond optimism or doom: How can we communicate the need for urgent climate action? XR Scientists webinar April 7th 2021

[43] The two agencies leading on Carbon Conversations training in the UK are: http://www.carbonconversations.co.uk/ and https://www.surefoot-effect.com/carbon-conversations-community.html

Climate Communications – An Overview

This is one of a series of posts entitled Principles and Advice for Grassroots Climate Communicators, in which I share and reflect on a range of ideas within the field, with a view to helping grassroots activists and groups communicate effectively.

 In this first post, I give an overview of the field as I see it. I go into more detailed consideration of certain questions in the related posts:

  • Climate communications: the pros and cons of different ‘frames’
  • ‘Emergency mobilisation’: the heated debate about the harnessing of uncomfortable feelings – and some possible solutions
  • Politicisation: moving people into effective campaigning
  • Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning?

If what you are looking for is practical tips on what to do on the ground, you will find a host of them in Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators.

You will find two appendices at the end of this post:

  1. Some questions for climate communications steering groups to consider
  2. Principal sources

Summary

  • This overview and its companion posts have been written to help community-based climate groups to develop their communications strategy and practice. As well as providing a wealth of practical ideas, I also raise a number of dilemmas, the central one being how to engage people in talking about something that is difficult to grasp and which can be frightening to contemplate.
  • A communications strategy should help you and your organisation to meet your organisational objectives, which therefore need to be clear. Your aims and objectives should be underpinned by an explicit theory of change.
  • Climate-concerned groups have different objectives. A common aspiration is to promote behaviour change i.e. encourage the public to adopt low-carbon lifestyles. But individual behaviours are intrinsically linked with group and societal norms. The paper suggests a number of ways that climate communications strategies may be more effective in encouraging and normalising behaviour change, and helping people to have a sense of ‘agency’.
  • To encourage any kind of social or cultural change, it is important to think systemically. But behaviour change in the context of global warming is especially complex. A major obstacle is the psychological phenomenon of disavowal. Grassroots communicators need to reflect deeply on disavowal and its implications, as well as to be aware of the tactics of climate deniers.
  • Disavowal is due to a number of factors, including the human fear of facing up to painful realities, people’s attachment to established ways of life and the sheer complexity of global heating. Climate communicators therefore need to work not just with information, but with people’s values, attitudes and emotions.
  • Because climate change can seem intangible and remote, climate communicators need to make the realities of global warming seem more salient and vivid to citizens, especially in developed countries, so that people can identify emotionally.
  • When challenging misinformation, disinformation and denial, one helpful strategy is to explain the tactics of the denialists, drawing on the processes of critical thinking. Many members of the public also need help with understanding scientific process and risk assessment. Moreover, the climate and nature emergencies pose deep moral and philosophical questions. Climate communications therefore needs a multi-pronged approach.
  • Different practitioners emphasise different frames through which to view  climate communications, including information, persuasion, emotion and action. A list of different frames is included, along with examples of different extant initiatives. Skilled climate communicators will probably want to work in more than one frame, guided by the needs of their target audience. A learning approach is recommended with no one-size-fits-all rules.
  • Over the last 20 years or so, a consensus has developed that climate communicators should seek to engage and motivate people without overwhelming them or triggering guilt or anxiety – what has been called a ‘gradualist’ approach. A list of the characteristics of the gradualist approach is provided, along with practical suggestions for communicators.
  • Some researchers believe that appeals to fear can be problematic and should only be used in specific circumstances. However, the ‘emergency mobilisation’ approach emphasises telling people the truth about how urgent and severe the crisis is and challenging them to work through their fears. This is a live debate in the field; it can be summed up as seeking a balance between conveying urgency and giving agency. One approach is to think in terms of ‘good news’ and ‘bad news’.
  • Despite the apparent divide between the gradualist and emergency mobilisation approaches, both camps agree on the importance of engaging citizens in conversations, and widening public engagement across society.
  • The standard advice on messaging is to concentrate on a few, simple, succinct messages that explain to people why they should take action. Because climate change is complex, messaging may also be about informing, educating or stimulating critical and philosophical thought.
  • Tailoring messages to the target audience is a basic principle of marketing and communications. Climate messages need to be considered in relation to different segments of the population, based on understanding of, and sympathy with, different people’s values, beliefs and needs.
  • In terms of information messaging, it is important for climate communicators to convey accurately the relevant impacts of different sources of greenhouse gas emissions and which strategies are most likely to achieve significant reductions. Because only governments can pass laws to enforce such reductions, one view is that the most important thing for concerned citizens to do is to pressurise their political representatives. However, alternative voices claim that change needs to come from the ground up; to the extent that climate change is now on the mainstream political agenda, it has much to do with the impact of campaigners, and the power of highly visual direct action.
  • Ideally, the government would provide a credible and committed national strategy that grassroots practitioners could help to communicate. The current UK government’s Net Zero strategy has yet to persuade the general population, however.
  • There is a strong case for being creative and experimental in climate communications, because of the insidious effects of disavowal. It is not enough simply to convey information messages, we need to attract people’s attention and to reach into their emotions and motivations. Artists, including storytellers, may bring valuable skills and experiences.
  • Creating spaces for people to meet and explore thoughts and feelings face-to-face, especially in supportive groups or communities, may be one of the most useful things to do. However, we now live in a digital age where many people in the general population are not only consumers but also producers in their own right. Community-based groups may therefore want to consider a co-production approach when developing innovative and attractive project ideas.
  • On the other hand, there is some value in embracing extant initiatives rather than reinventing the wheel. Carbon Literacy is proposed as perhaps the strongest contender. However, it has its limitations which need to be recognised. Community-based climate groups should therefore think in terms of having a raft of initiatives, from quick, fun, no-strings, introductory, action-based activities, through to more formal courses such as Carbon Literacy and Carbon Conversations.
  • It may be helpful to think in terms of a ‘ladder’ of engagement. In my companion post, Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators, I have compiled a large number of tips, organised as a ‘ladder’ from first contact through to deep involvement: approach > engagement > rapport > conversation > messaging > empowerment > politicisation.
  • At the end of this post, you will a list of questions to consider when designing a community-based climate awareness programme and communications strategy. If you are pressured for time, I suggest that you skip to that list.

Introduction

In this series of posts, my aim is to share ideas of practical use both to strategic project planners and to practitioners on the ground. This first post provides an overview of current thinking about effective climate communications. As well as providing a wealth of practical ideas, I also raise a number of dilemmas – the central one of which is how to engage people in talking about something that is so difficult to grasp and which can also be frightening to contemplate. I suggest a number of solutions but you will have to make your own decisions based on your own values and your own situation.

It may help to know where I’m coming from. My background is in the theatre, teaching, counselling and training. These posts grew out of research I was undertaking for a PhD into creative approaches to climate communications (unfinished owing to illness.) So I am not an expert in media-based communications, although I have in the past managed a South Yorkshire wide communications strategy for an education programme. Ideally these posts would include more on topics as social media, the news media, the use of visual imagery[1] and branding. However I did come across an excellent paper from a working climate communications professional, Mairi Dupar, and I have included a summary of her recommendations in Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators. I highly recommend that grassroots communications practitioners read her guide in full.[2]

I also want to acknowledge that I am clinging to the coat tails of the real experts in the field.  Climate Outreach, for example, is a leading organisation, conducting research and producing a multiplicity of guides for communicating with particular groups.. You could, if you wish, skip reading my posts and go straight to its website.[3] But Climate Outreach is not the only organisation out there; my review of the field aims to give you an introduction to the diversity of approaches, inviting you to consider the pros and cons of each. You will find a list of my main sources in Appendix 2 at the bottom of this post. Other references are given in the footnotes.

Purpose and scope

I have taken ‘communications’ to mean the quality of interaction with target audiences, across all activities, rather than only ‘corporate’ or media-based communications. In other words, these posts are primarily about the ‘engagement’ side of climate communications. The main reason for writing them is that, although climate change is now on the mainstream political agenda, we still have a long way to go in terms of engaging the general population – and without that engagement, the politicians will be limited in what they can do.

Climate communications is a rapidly evolving field and I am not claiming that this is an exhaustive review of the literature. However, at this point in time (November 2021), I’m posting it as it is; the scope may widen as I come across more ideas. I expect to be adding/editing as time goes on. I’m aware that this overview could include more on corporate communications methods, for example, the section on behaviour change could be filled out further, and I want to think more about the place of rhetoric, verbal persuasion and motivational interviewing. Nonetheless, despite its gaps, I hope you will find these six posts are sufficiently broad to help you map out the terrain, formulate your own principles and arm you with plenty of ideas to put into practice.

I would be delighted to receive comments on any aspect of these posts. If you would like me to amend or add something to the text, do please send me your thoughts in the form of a sentence or paragraph that I could easily insert. I would, of course, credit you for your contribution.

These posts have been written in the context of a community-based climate awareness programme here in South Yorkshire. Although I have a background in working with schools, I have chosen not to look into school-based climate education here. However, I do refer to some ‘climate conversations’ workshops that I have run in a Higher Education context.

Thinking strategically

It might be useful to clarify what I mean by ‘strategic leaders’ in the text. I am assuming that in many community groups, there will be something like a steering group that takes responsibility for thinking strategically. For me, that means:

  • looking to long-term outcomes
  • considering how different strands of activity will relate to each other
  • anticipating obstacles and difficulties and planning for them
  • resourcing the project
  • understanding how the project will complement the work of others in the field

In other words, I assume that at least some people in the group are committed to thinking beyond the delivery of current activities, focusing on maximising the project’s effectiveness over time – what will be done in roughly what order, using which methods – and why. A strategy is not just a list of upcoming activities. Similarly, a communications strategy isn’t just a list of how many press releases and tweets you will put out in the next month; it is a long-term plan for how you will engage with and impact on your target audiences.

Developing a written communications strategy

Please note that none of these posts is offered as a communications strategy as such; rather I hope they will be useful stimuli (or provocations) towards producing one.[4]

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NVCO) says the purpose of a communications strategy is “to help you and your organisation communicate effectively and meet core organisational objectives.” Community groups therefore need to be clear about what their high level aims are, as well as their day to day objectives, i.e. not only what you will do but why. What outcomes do you hope to achieve: understanding of the science of global warming? individual behaviour change? decarbonisation of your local industry? political engagement? etc. And then of course, you need to decide how you will achieve those aims and objectives – what methods you will use and why, and what your underlying theory of change is.

Some objectives relative to the group I am currently working with are:

  • Disseminate accurate information about the climate emergency and its implications for people in our region
  • Countermand misinformation (errors in understanding), disinformation (incorrect information deliberately promoted with the intention of deceiving) and denial (rejection of climate change science)
  • Provoke discussion and reflection
  • Persuade or encourage people to take notice and take action

There are communications implications for all such desired outcomes, whether face-to-face or remote. (One point is that, in writing a communications strategy, it can be helpful to tease out ‘action words’ that make the purpose and mode of each objective clear and compelling, as where I have used ‘provoke’ and ‘persuade’ and ‘encourage’ above.)

More fundamentally, your group needs to create or adopt an explicit theory of change which will guide you in setting your communications aims and objectives (including the language you use.) Climate Outreach’s theory of change is a good, clear example. They state:

“Our theory of change sets out why the work we do matters, and how we’re going to get from where we are to where we need to be… We’re convinced we cannot tackle climate change without broad-based public engagement… Technological advances as well as regulations, policies and laws are necessary for tackling climate change but these won’t work in the long term without the active engagement and buy-in of citizens. This informed consent for action is what’s known as a social mandate – and we believe it’s how real change happens.” (https://climateoutreach.org/about-us/theory-of-change/)

I think it’s important to bear in mind the different roles and powers of different authorities, agencies and groups. Nobody can do it all, and there is a big risk that community-based activists take on too much and burn out. In writing your theory of change and your long-term strategy, what is it that your group can specifically contribute?

Similarly, as an individual, you might try to identify your ‘activist’s sweet spot’.[5] Here is my version of this model. Obviously, the sweet spot is the pink area in the middle. I have found this simple model very useful. Why would I slog away at something I’m actually not good at? Why would I keep doing something if it made me miserable or sick? Why would I set huge aspirational goals if there was no chance that I would ever meet them? Why would I keep doing something that wasn’t actually making much of a difference?

Behaviour change

Climate Outreach’s theory of change is premised on its perception that the fundamental change needed is to bring about a new ‘social mandate’ i.e. they want to spread public awareness and thus gain support for political action. However a different set of theories you may want to look at are around behaviour change. Many community climate projects want to encourage low carbon behaviours, but how can they do that?

The closest parallels are probably with health education. Here are a few points from the literature[6] that I think are relevant to developing a climate communications strategy.

There is a lack of agreement on the most effective approaches to behaviour change because the evidence is broad, the methods used are diverse and the assumptions made about science, knowledge and explanation vary considerably. Also, the interaction between individual and society is complex. Our habits are deeply rooted not only within ourselves but within a social ecology that normalises them. As individuals we may be consciously aware of some of those societal norms and we may be completely unaware of others, even though we observe them.

With regard to individual behaviour change, the “Theory of Planned Behaviour” (Ajzen 1991) is the most widely applied model in the field. One of its core concepts is ‘perceived behavioural control’ (PBC): PBC is a person’s perception of whether or not they can control their actions and is closely related to the concept of ‘self-efficacy’. To what extent do your target groups have, or feel they have, the power and ability to change their behaviour? To what extent do they believe that they have ‘agency’? To what extent do they actually have agency?

I would like to comment here about the ‘value/action gap’ that climate activists often talk about. What they mean is, even though people say they care about the climate, they don’t actually take action to reduce their own carbon footprints – or at least, not sufficiently large actions. (They say things like “Well, I always recycle.”) I accept that this happens but I find the concept of the value/action gap problematic. It implies some kind of dishonesty or selfishness on the part of our target groups and some kind of moral superiority on our own part. Social norms are incredibly powerful and we are all hugely constrained by them and by the physical infrastructure and the modus operandi of the society around us. Does that mean that individuals can’t make any changes? No. But it does mean that bringing people together may be a crucial part of any climate awareness programme; perhaps climate communicators will better help to create new social norms if they think of working in and with groups, so that people discover they are not alone in wanting to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle.[7]

Don’t some people need to set the trend, to be courageous, not to be afraid of standing out? Undoubtedly yes – and they do – but they always run the risk of being seen as freaks. A key word seems to be ‘normalise’.[8]

Is there anything else that we can learn from the efforts of health educators to affect individual behaviour change? Glenn Laverack makes some relevant points, including some warnings about mistakes to avoid.

The assumption is that, before people can change their lifestyle, they must first:

  • understand basic facts about a particular issue
  • adopt key attitudes
  • learn a set of skills
  • be given access to appropriate services.

Health educators therefore use a range of techniques including interactive communication technologies, motivation, counselling, persuasion, influencing social norms and coercion. However, it is not clear that this approach works, despite it still being widely adopted!

One problem that Laverack highlights is that health promotion has often relied on pre-packaged, top-down programmes. These have not guaranteed a change in behaviour, he says, but have led to a “blaming of the victim” (for example, for drinking too much alcohol or continuing to smoke.) This can create feelings of mistrust between ‘expert’ practitioners and the public, further exasperated by changes in health messaging, for example, on the safe levels of alcohol consumption.

People resist ‘being changed’, especially when they feel patronised. Laverack warns against:

  • didactic styles of communication
  • inadequate audience segmentation
  • inappropriate message content
  • weak materials.

The art of health promotion is knowing when and how to use the science to produce a desired outcome, he says, but many practitioners lack the competence and confidence to achieve this in different contexts.

In summary, Laverack says behaviour change can be made more effective and sustainable if the following elements are included:

  • a strong policy framework that creates a supportive environment
  • an enablement of people to empower themselves[9]

What can we pull out of all this to help with designing our climate communications strategies? Perhaps the following:

  • Think in terms of groups as much as of individuals, aiming to ‘normalise’  sustainable behaviours.
  • Adopt approaches which enable people to empower themselves. Think in terms of increasing people’s ‘perceived behavioural control’ or ‘agency’.
  • Appreciate that climate education is about more than just the facts, it is also about attitudes, skills, support services, etc. (I would include training here.) This means that your programme should ideally be multi-faceted.
  • Develop good-quality materials. Beware of pre-packaged ‘top-down’ materials. (Instead, ‘co-produce’ materials in partnership with your audiences.)
  • Consider different audience segments and tailor messages appropriately.
  • Be very wary of any unintentionally patronising approaches or didactic messages.
  • Support and train practitioners to develop the confidence and confidence to “know when and how to use the science to produce a desired outcome”.
  • Call for and contribute to a strong policy environment that supports and gives credibility to individual and community-based behaviour change.

Contribution to social change/cultural shift

The climate and nature emergencies aren’t just a matter of making a few technological tweaks; they’re going to mean changes right across our society and economy. What climate communicators are therefore trying to do is to change the culture. How to do that is a huge question, far beyond my expertise. However, I will offer a couple of stimuli for consideration here, that may be useful for your communications strategy.

In Politicisation: moving people into effective campaigning, I include a section on ‘community organising’, based on Matthew Bolton’s book, How To Resist. The community organising approach is premised on the perception that human beings act out of ‘self-interest’. Consequently, community organisers/ campaigners are advised to start by listening to people in the community to find out what their self interest is. A recommended opening question is “what makes you angry?” Community organisers work with the community, on the above basis, to decide what it is that they feel strongly enough to want to organise around. In other words, campaigners are advised not to go in with the intention of pushing their own agenda.

This approach, which surely has some merit (realistic, grounded in experience) would appear to count out a bunch of outsiders coming into a community to tell people they should be cutting their carbon emissions! I note that one drama-based climate change project in rural Africa ended up making a performance about sexism and gender roles; the community wasn’t primarily worried about climate change at that time. In some similar work that I did in this country, supporting participatory drama projects in the community, several practitioners emphasised that the best work with the most impact happened after a long period of trust building, listening and learning. The question therefore arises: would your group count it a success if it contributed to community empowerment but did not actually achieve any decarbonisation – perhaps didn’t even get the community engaged with the climate issue?

Or does your group (and its funders) want to be very clear about your purposes, even at the risk of alienating some potential participants?

Thinking systemically

One project that perhaps offers a model to learn from is the Change 4 Life health programme. A key aspect of that approach is to see that the programme’s messages are visible and reinforced across a wide range of settings within the community, covering private, public and voluntary sectors. You might see a Change 4 Life poster not only in the doctor’s waiting room, but at the bank and the supermarket, and at the school.

This is an example of thinking ‘systemically’. Here in Sheffield, the Climate Communications Hub (the voluntary organisation I work with) produced a publication on this theme, Changing Systems, Not Just Lightbulbs, which looked at systemic change within universities, but is relevant to other settings too.[10] The contributors identified four key aspects of a systemic approach to change:

  • Clear messages from the top-down
  • Strong engagement from bottom up, at the grassroots
  • Links built across the system, breaking down silos
  • The prototyping of innovative ideas, coupled with support for scaling the best ones up

No doubt your group is already working on the second of these points, but you might like to bear in mind the other three. A clear message from the top helps to give credibility. Cultural shift may be enhanced if the projects you initiate or support not only respect different identities but bring people of different backgrounds and persuasions together. And the best practical ideas may not come from us activists at all, but from within the community, and will have far more impact if you can enable them to be put into practice and go through a process of improvement and development.

The challenges specific to climate communications

All of the above are generic concerns to do with social change, whether in individuals or in communities.  But there are number of challenges which are specific to climate communications. If your group shares an understanding of these challenges, it will help with the formation of an effective and strategic communications plan. These challenges include:

  • Climate change as a ‘wicked problem’
  • The phenomenon of psychological ‘disavowal’
  • The history, and to some extent the on-going efforts, of denialists
  • The unprecedented nature and scale of the challenge

I will briefly describe each of these problems.

Climate change as a ‘wicked problem’

In his seminal book, Don’t Even Think About It, Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall lists a number of factors that come together to make climate change particularly difficult for people to grasp – to make it what some call a ‘wicked problem’. In essence, climate change, especially for people in developed countries, has often seemed such a remote and abstract threat that it has failed to trigger our panic responses. We human beings evolved to jump and take action when we heard a sudden sound near us in the undergrowth, not when subtle changes were taking place slowly over time, miles above us or on the other side of the world. The table below lists some of the aspects of climate change that make it hard to engage with. Some possible solutions are shown in the right-hand column. The over-riding task of climate communicators can be summarised as: make the realities of global warming more salient or vivid to people, so that they can identify with it emotionally.

Characteristic of global warmingPossible communications response
DistantFind local relevance
HugeBreak global warming down into small components
ComplexAcknowledge the complexity but promote scientifically recognised levers for effective decarbonisation (e.g. reducing beef consumption, using public transport, insulating homes)
Slow moving and invisibleHelp people to notice changes that are happening now
IntergenerationalEngage with young people whose lives are likely to be directly affected by rising temperatures
Challenges our way of lifeSeek solutions that enable people to have a satisfying, if somewhat different, quality-of-life Ensure that the necessary transition to a sustainable economy is well-planned, well explained and that everybody’s needs are thought about fairly

The phenomenon of psychological ‘disavowal’

There may be other reasons, as well as physical remoteness etc, why the populations of developed countries (which weren’t until recently experiencing the impacts of global warming themselves) were not engaging with the issue, even if they understood intellectually that it was a problem. They might simply not want to face up to it! Psychologists working in the field theorise that human beings are not good at facing up to painful realities. To some extent, we all prefer to live in denial of our own vulnerability (and ultimately of our own death.) They call this phenomenon ‘disavowal’.

I think it is important for climate communicators to grasp that, if people seem to be resistant to thinking and talking about climate change, that isn’t just obtuseness or ignorance on their part; it is actually an understandable survival strategy. This is especially so where people feel they have little or no agency to make any difference anyway. If they put it into words, they might say: “I’ve got enough on my plate, I’ve got no mental space to think about this. And anyway, what can I do about it?”

In one of my recent climate conversations, Janelle, an 18 year old undergraduate, said exactly this: “It’s never something I think about, especially today, with the pandemic, being at university, being with friends, thinking what job I will have. It isn’t in the forefront of anyone’s mind. There’s nothing to make us talk about it… And anyway, why should I take a 5-minute shower instead of a 15-minute one when they aren’t clearing up oil spills or repairing the damage they’re doing to the rainforest?”

(It is interesting to note that she also raised the question of equity, her scepticism that ‘we are all in this together’, as one politician famously asserted.  The question of fairness is another one that climate communicators need to think about.)

Climate psychologists propose that the way to deal with emotional resistance or disavowal is to make safe spaces where people can look at their own feelings and share them with others. But can this be done on a large scale? One approach has been developed by Arnold Mindell in his ‘deep democracy forums’.[11]

The history, and to some extent the on-going efforts, of denialists

The challenge of conveying accurate information about global warming to the world’s populations has been held back by:

  • misinformation (errors in understanding)
  • disinformation (incorrect information deliberately promoted with the intention of deceiving)
  • denial (rejection of climate change science.)

But the current perception in the field is that overt denialism has had its day. The efforts of campaigners such as Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and David Attenborough, coupled with the increasing evidence of erratic and hot weather across the globe, including here in the UK, have finally put climate change on the mainstream political agenda. Surveys show that the majority of the population now accept that climate change is a reality. Commentators such as Adam Corner therefore propose that the emphasis should be shifted away from challenging the lies put out by denialists and placed instead on working for cultural shift. That might mean concentrating our efforts on widening understanding, building support for political action and helping people find things they can actually do.

However, the climate scientist Michael E Mann warns that the denialists have not totally given up. Their rhetoric may now be more ‘green’ but behind the scenes they are still trying to slow the transition down. One of their tactics is to assert the continuing role of fossil fuels, e.g. for producing ‘blue’ hydrogen. Another is to sow doubt about the possibility of change. They are, he says, promoting ‘inactivism’.[12]

And denialism has not totally left the stage, it may suddenly rear its head in the middle of any climate conversation or debate. Climate communicators should therefore know what the main traits of denialism are and have a toolkit for dealing with them. John Cook has produced a number of accessible works both in print and online to help here: he proposes that we ‘inoculate’ audiences by explaining the denialists’ methods to them,  including: employing Fake experts, arguing using Logical fallacies, setting Impossible expectations of climate scientists, Cherry picking the evidence, and spreading Conspiracy theories. (FLICC)

Cook draws on good practice in what is called ‘critical thinking’. When climate communicators want to disabuse a person of some misinformation or disinformation they have come to believe, they not only need to be tactful and emotionally sensitive, they also need to know how to guide people through a critical thinking process. I agree with Cook that practising and teaching the basics of critical thinking is an important part of climate education. Moreover, that thinking process needs to include critical examination  of the motivations and ideologies of those who deliberately oppose action to eliminate fossil fuels.

The unprecedented nature and scale of the challenge

Another difficulty for climate communicators is simply that the human race has never before encountered a challenge on this scale and although the literature is awash with suggested solutions and blueprints, we are all living in a state of uncertainty. The risks that we face are calculated by scientists based upon their observations and the models that they use to predict future trends. Communicating these risks to the general public can be tricky,  especially as many of us don’t have a good grasp of either scientific method or risk assessment. Most of us are statistically illiterate and the media consistently fails to communicate statistics effectively. (For example, journalists rarely mention the ‘base rate’ of a particular phenomenon, so when they say ‘raging fires cover a thousand square miles in California’, we have no idea whether that is a typical or an exceptional figure.)

Climate communicators therefore face the challenge of explaining the science in an accessible way and helping people to understand and assess risk.

And they (we) are also potentially leading our audience towards philosophical, even religious questions, such as: what is the purpose of human beings?  what is our role on this planet? how much control do we have over our own futures?[13]  Arguably, therefore, there is a place for philosophical and spiritual reflection in our climate communications portfolio.

The different frames employed in climate communications

Because climate change is multifaceted – almost all encompassing – there are many different ways to look at it and climate communicators and campaigners tend to select a particular ‘lens’ or ‘frame’ through which to look at it or to focus their activities. A ‘frame’ is essentially a way to simplify a complex phenomenon, perhaps claiming that such and such an aspect is at the heart of it, or is the best way in to understanding it or affecting it.  Frames commonly used in climate communications include the ones below.  I have put them in a table with the main assumptions underlying each frame on the left and an example of a practical application on the right. (For a more detailed consideration of this topic, please see my post Climate communications: the pros and cons of different ‘frames’.)

Frames used in climate communications

Frame with its core assumptionExamples
Information: People need to know the facts about global warming in order to appreciate how serious the situation is.The Carbon Literacy Project proposes that every citizen should have one day’s training covering the basic facts of global warming, tailored to be relevant  to the specific audience.
Persuasion: people need to be persuaded to face the issue and take action, either through some kind of reward or through appeals to their deeper values[14] and identity.Climate Outreach proposes that climate communicators research the interests, values and needs of particular communities, and try to link climate action with what matters to them. At a commercial level, advertisers are increasingly using ‘green’ language and imagery in order to persuade people to buy their products.
Conversation: human beings aren’t atomised individuals, we form our views through dialogue with others.Carbon Conversations is a six session course designed originally for community settings. The participants explore the facts and their feelings about cutting their carbon footprints through conversation and enjoyable games. I myself have run a simpler version, called Climate Conversations,  focusing down on teaching skills in listening and constructive argumentation. In the political arena, hope for the future have developed a model for the constructive lobbying of MPs, based on the Non-Violent Communication approach (NVC).
Emotion: on the one hand, climate change raises strong negative emotions which block people’s engagement (‘disavowal’), so the way forward has to include confronting those emotions; on the other, it is positive emotions that motivate people.The Active Hope approach involves running workshops where are people are taken on an emotional journey,  facing up to their repressed fears, expressing their grief and working through to ‘seeing the world with new eyes’.
Reason: although it may be limited, human beings are capable of reason; the climate crisis raises both profound philosophical questions and challenges us to think logically and strategically.Grace Lockrobin and other ‘community philosophers’ are running events online, in communities and in schools that support and challenge participants to think about environmental issues critically and philosophically.
Choice: the climate crisis confronts us with difficult choices, including technical, moral and political.David McKay and Mark Lynas ran an event at the Showroom Cinema where they challenged the audience to think through the difficult choices that will be need to be made if renewables are to replace all fossil fuels.
Storytelling, Imagination and the Arts: Human beings don’t live by logical arguments, we live by myths and stories – about our own lives, about our societies and about the meaning of our lives – and we are moved by images. Art is a fundamental part of who we are. If you want to reach human beings you need to stimulate their senses and imaginations.Community artists draw on a wide range of art forms to connect with people’s subconsciouses, personal icons and imaginations. Michigan University runs an online course in Storytelling for Social Change. Marshall Ganz and others run workshops to help activists discover and/or write their own story as social change agents.
Action: a surfeit of words is off-putting to many, they would rather be drawn into doing interesting things and by acting they will feel both purposeful and hopeful. Activities which help people to ‘fall back in love with nature’ maybe particularly effective.The Transition Town movement focuses on practical activities such as growing organic foods that can draw people in. Trees for Life takes groups out into the woods to learn forestry skills and also hold dialogues away from the stresses of urban life.
Empowerment: the problem isn’t knowledge or understanding, the problem is people feeling that they can do nothing about it, so climate communicators should focus on giving people the tools and skills they need to change things.Many Transition Town projects teach practical skills, especially relating to working in nature. The Carbon Conversations course includes auditing your own energy use, travel and purchases, and supports participants to develop practical action plans. My own Climate Conversations courses teach skills in listening and dialogue.
Motivation: people need appealing visions, encouragement, inspiration and other rewards such as enjoyment in order to want to engage with what can otherwise seem a daunting task.The Active Hope approach aims to inspire people by taking them through a challenging but liberating emotional process. Many writers have produced books full of good ideas and lively imagery for young people and for adults. Extinction Rebellion has stated its aim to promote a ‘regenerative’  culture to reduce the risk of burnout amongst activists.
Leadership development: climate communicators should place the emphasis on those most likely to lead the transition to sustainability, the others will follow.Former US Vice President, Al Gore, has created the Climate Reality programme  which trains people up as climate leaders and communicators, especially young adults.
Political mobilisation: commentators frequently emphasise that the biggest obstacles to change are a lack of political will and/or vested interests. Moreover, individuals and communities have limited power to change the wider society, so people need to understand the need for political action.Environmental activists continue to campaign in various ways, increasingly seeking to attract attention through eye-catching creative actions.  Historically, they have tended to come from the left of the political spectrum but increasingly activists in the centre and centre right are speaking up (e.g. the Conservative Environment Network.) Hope for the Future is promoting a conciliatory approach to lobbying. Community Organising is one of many approaches to grass roots political engagement.
Emergency mobilisation: the situation is perilous and the emphasis should be on communicating urgency and generating absolute determination across society, akin to mobilising a society for war.Climate Mobilisation and Extinction Rebellion seek to draw the general public’s attention to the need for urgent and radical action.

The frames listed above are generic. We could add to it specific sectors or needs, such as health or food. Where the general public does not respond to the rather abstract concept of climate change, it may respond better to a frame that is clearly of immediate personal relevance. For example, a group of General Practitioners in the UK have formed Greener Practice to draw the attention of both their colleagues and their patients to the healthy co-benefits of sustainability, such as ‘active travel’, meaning walking and cycling – helping people stay fit whilst also reducing road pollution and carbon emissions. (https://www.greenerpractice.co.uk/)

Which of all these frames should your group focus on?

The purpose of these posts is to throw that question back to you – both your steering group and the comms practitioners on your team. Each of the frames has its merits but also its downsides. Probably, as skilled climate communicators, we would want to work in more than one frame, in order to maximise our effectiveness, but we need to be led by consideration of our audiences and our high-level aims and objectives.

Taking a learning approach

My key recommendation to grassroots climate communicators is to embrace a learning approach; to try out different messages and approaches with different audiences, give time to evaluating them, think critically about both successes and failures, and adapt practice accordingly. A fundamental principle seems to me that there are no one-size-fits-all rules. Before engaging in any piece of climate communications, we should ask ourselves the ‘question word questions’:

  • WHO is my audience?
  • WHAT do I want to communicate to them?
  • WHY? What result do I hope for? (Behaviour change? Policy change?)[15]
  • HOW? What content, vocabulary and tone would be most persuasive for the recipient(s)?
  • WHEN and WHERE is that communication likely to be best received?
  • WHO would be a good person to make that communication?

Common threads

Are there any common threads that run through all these different approaches? I would argue that a consensus has developed in the field about the typical elements of what you might call ‘audience-friendly’ climate communications. I refer to this as the ‘gradualist’ approach, a term used by the activist Margaret Klein Salamon to distinguish it from her own approach, which emphasises emergency mobilisation. The central concern of the gradualist approach is to engage and motivate people without overwhelming them or triggering guilt or anxiety.

Characteristics of a gradualist approach to climate communications[16]

RelationalUnderstand that communications are two-way; approach people with respect and curiosity; listen well.
PositiveLead with solutions and benefits; emphasise that the fight is winnable.
Action orientedTell people what they can do to make a difference; invite them to join in activities.
Local activities that make a difference to the global challengeEnable people to see that taking action is worthwhile and has an impact at both scales.
EnjoyableMake the activities easy, fun, intriguing.
Simple messages that connect with daily lifeGive key facts only, not too much data; explain the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions simply.
Tailored to specific audiences, local cultures and local needsBring the climate and ecological emergencies ‘close to home’; understand and use language relevant to people’s identities, beliefs and values.
Be sensitive to gender and other protected characteristicsWhen communicating with different audiences, recognise that people have different interests and needs and some are struggling with discrimination or disadvantage which affects their perceptions of what is important and what is possible.
Peer-to-peer / trusted messengersFacilitate grassroots dialogue; seek out and encourage as ambassadors people who will be trusted by the particular audience.
Make science meaningfulTell appealing human and animal stories; use interesting visuals; translate scientific language and use no acronyms.
Use attractive images and other creative forms of communicationAppeal to the senses; attract people’s interest; stimulate their imaginations and leave vivid memories.
Inoculate against misinformation and denialAddress misinformation and denial head on, explaining how to spot the tactics commonly used. A related project is to explain the psychology of climate ‘disavowal’ so the people understand why this topic is often difficult to engage with.

The gradualist consensus also warns against:

Presenting oneself as a cliquish, politically ideological environmentalistEschew stereotypically ‘green’ or leftist imagery and vocabulary; reach out to all types of audience, emphasise the universality of the emergency and seek to identify ‘communal’ values shared across the political spectrum.
Employing fear-based appeals,  other than in specific conditionsSome researchers claim that fear-based appeals only work as a short-term method of attracting attention for those already on the path to changing behaviours; when they depict a significant and relevant threat; and when constructive responses to the threat are also identified.[17]

This latter point is an on-going bone of contention. Activists such as Margaret Klein Salamon completely disagree with the idea of avoiding fear messages. It may be that your group’s top priority is not to alienate your target audiences. But Salamon and her colleagues in organisation such as Extinction Rebellion do have a point. They say that the gradualist ‘keep calm’ approach has not led to sufficiently wide engagement and commitment. They say that difficult feelings can be worked through; in fact, as Greta Thunberg has said, we really should be panicking! They point out that responsible governments haven’t dealt with the coronavirus pandemic by avoiding information that might scare people, nor did the Allies pretend that the Nazis were not a serious threat in World War II. In fact, they say, we should be raising the alarm loudly, demanding a ‘World War II type mobilisation of our entire society’ and making that the central message of all our communications.

Balancing urgency and agency

This debate is about the balance between conveying urgency and giving agency – a tricky balance that needs to be achieved in both shorter and longer communications, both informal and formal. Audiences need to be sensitively guided to face the seriousness of the situation, and the feelings that may bring up, but also to learn and practice ways that they can make a genuine difference and feel renewed hope. George Marshall advises that, wherever possible, climate communicators should “place negative information in a narrative arc that leads to a positive resolution.”[18] Another working idea we have been exploring in our own Climate  Communications Hub is to have at hand a list of examples of ‘good news’ (to boost the spirits of those feeling hopeless) and ‘bad news’ (to shake people out of complacency or ignorance.)

Fear appeals

I think we should take on board what the researchers say about when fear appeals work and when they don’t, but perhaps we could distinguish between ‘fear appeals’ and truth statements. We might feel especially justified in having a more confrontational attitude to people in power, for example. They are still human beings, still prone to disavowal like the rest of us, and I understand the value of Hope for the Future’s  conciliatory approach,  premised on building a good working relationship,[19] but they are also people who have accepted responsibility and perhaps, sometimes, we should hold their feet to the fire.

Unifying concerns

Even with this apparent divide between the gradualist and emergency mobilisation approaches, it seems to me that a number of shared concerns emerge, e.g.

  • the importance of engaging citizens in meaningful conversations
  • the importance of telling the truth and countermanding disavowal and denialism
  • the importance of balancing urgency with agency
  • the need for sensitive, knowledgeable and skilful facilitation with individuals and groups

Another shared perception is that much wider public engagement is needed – for at least two reasons. Firstly, the society-wide political and economic changes that we need can only be put in place by governments. But, as Sheffield politician Paul Blomfield has emphasised, MPs are elected to represent their constituents’ concerns; if their constituents are not pestering them about climate change it is hard for them to prioritise taking action on it. But secondly, and more profoundly, the changes will not be possible without widespread public support; no government can order radical change from above if the people do not understand the reasons why and see the benefits to them individually, and to their communities.

What should your group’s key messages be?

I have to note that as just as I came up to writing this section, I took a break to attend a webinar with the celebrated novelist, Amitav Ghosh, whose book The Great Derangement has been very influential in terms of the arts and climate change. I asked him the question how to balance urgency and agency in climate communications and he took exception to the question. Climate change is absolutely not an issue of communications, he said, everybody knows about it! And writers and artists shouldn’t be seen as communicators of messages. Climate change is the biggest thing that has ever happened to us as a species. Everybody has their own point of view and should be able to express it.

I interpret this as meaning that the existential crisis we face is of a completely different order from, say, health education, that I have referred to here. Ghosh’s perspective adds weight to those who say that the main aim of our engagement with our audiences should be to facilitate philosophical reflection. I’m reminded of another artist, Alistair McDowall, who wrote a play simply called ‘X’ in which the characters, confronted by the realities of climate change, gradually lose the power of speech. One critic interpreted this as the only truthful response to a crisis that exceeds anything that we have ever before put into words.

But here we are, all doing our best to contribute to the cultural shift that we hope will enable us to prevent terminal catastrophe for human civilisation! So I will continue with my communications tips…

Tips for messages

The standard advice on communications, reinforced by gradualist climate communicators, is to concentrate on a few key messages. I would suggest that behaviour change messages should:

  • be simple and clear
  • be scientifically sound
  • seem realistic/feasible
  • make sustainable behaviours seem easy and the ‘new normal’
  • be encouraging
  • appear fair
  • address disavowal (seek to make climate change salient and relevant)
  • promote communal values and/or be tailored to specific groups
  • communicate both urgency and agency
  • seek to provoke critical thinking and dialogue
  • be aligned with your organisation’s long-term strategy
  • and ideally be imaginative too.

In terms of information messages, your group might consider producing a ‘crib-sheet’ of key information – perhaps sorted into ‘good news’ and ‘bad news’. We discovered when practising and facilitating climate conversations through the Climate Communications Hub in Sheffield that people often felt insecure about their level of knowledge, so we provided them with a little ‘cue card’ to help them to structure their conversations, backed up with an information sheet. In the light of the messages that your steering group wants to make central to your programme, it might be a profitable task to set the team to produce some resources such as this.[20]

Give clear messages about the most effective actions for ordinary citizens to take

Messaging in the context of the climate and nature emergencies is not a simple matter. A climate message could be said to be a short, compelling statement that persuades citizens to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is relatively straightforward when we are aiming to promote specific behaviour changes. However, we know that the climate and nature emergencies are complex and our messaging is complicated by needing to break through the insidious, multilayered veils of disavowal and denial. So our climate messages may also be about informing, educating, encouraging or provoking thought. And even when a person is reasonably well-informed and reasonably – or even passionately – committed to taking action, there are many questions about which kind of action would be best to take.

It is said that the test of a good political message comes when a campaigner can give a concise, persuasive reply to the question, “Why should I vote for you?” With specific decarbonising behaviour changes, there is a clear parallel. We need to have succinct, persuasive replies to such questions as: Why should I drive less? Why should I eat less meat?  

But we might also need answers to questions such as: How do we know for sure? Why should I be bothered if no-one else is doing it?  If this factory closes down, where is a man in his 50s like me going to get a new job? Isn’t it all too late anyway?

How you answer such questions will, of course, depend on who you are talking to. Tailoring your messages to different audiences is a basic principle of all comms. It is nothing new to point out that people have different values, beliefs and priorities in life, and that we all belong not only to the dominant culture that surrounds us but to particular sub-cultures and social groups. One of the criticisms often thrown at environmental campaigners is that they/we tend to be middle class and left wing and, as such, insufficiently sympathetic to the interests, needs and priorities of people who are working class and/or on the right. Once again, Climate Outreach has led the field in this country in looking at messages that might appeal to different segments of the population, and with different class, political or faith allegiances. In Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators you will find a summary of their research ‘Britain Talks Climate’ in which they describe seven segments of the UK population and how best to approach each of them.

So I don’t think it is up to me to decide what the best messages for your group to focus on would be. I think that is a decision for you and your partners, in consultation with climate scientists, based on your analysis of the social groups you want to reach.

However I will make a few general comments about climate messaging to provoke discussion. (Please note that deciding what messages to focus on is a separate matter from deciding how to convey them.)

Because so many people are confused about it, one thing that seems crucial is to convey accurately the relevant impacts of different sources of emissions and therefore the most impactful actions that ordinary people can take. Very commonly, when asked about climate change, people will quickly talk about recycling, for example. Whilst recycling is an important aspect of developing a circular economy, it will not bring about significant reductions in carbon emissions. The urgent task is to rapidly reduce the greenhouse gases that are being pumped into the atmosphere, preferably to zero. I see four main strategies to achieve this:

  • Drastically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions produced by the biggest polluters, such as the energy, cement, steel and beef industries.
  • Change the infrastructure around us, such as transport and buildings, moving away from systems that produce greenhouse gases.
  • Maximise carbon sinks. Call for radical conservation and restoration policies for natural carbon sinks, as well as exploring the possibilities of carbon capture and storage through artificial means.
  • Persuade ordinary people to change their behaviours in ways that might be small in themselves but would make a big cumulative difference if everybody did them.

All four strategies will have more success if governments take the lead. We need massive structural changes if we are to get from ‘two-planet living’ to ‘one-planet living’ and only governments can pass laws to make emissions reductions compulsory and to create a ‘level playing field’ for businesses. They can also set up systems that will incentivise change (such as taxing carbon emitting industries or providing subsidies to encourage householders to insulate their houses and cut their energy use.)

Because MPs who want to take action on climate change say they can only do so when they have enough constituents pestering them to do so, and they need a ‘social mandate’ in support of new sustainability policies, two further candidates for ‘key messages’ to ordinary citizens are:

  • put pressure on your MP and local councillors to pass laws that require or incentivise reductions in greenhouse gas emissions;
  • set an example in your own lifestyle and encourage family, friends, neighbours and colleagues to follow suit.

Many books and websites recommend specific actions that ordinary citizens can take to cut their personal carbon footprints. My own list of the six most impactful actions, in addition to political action, that people can take, in order of ease of application, is:

  • Switch your energy supplier to one that uses only renewable energy
  • Turn your heating down to 20 degrees or less
  • Eat less meat and dairy foods (or none)
  • Drive less; walk and cycle more
  • Fly less or not at all.
  • Better insulate your home (if you own it)

However, Keith Allott, Director (Power Transition) at the European Climate Foundation gave me a different list when I interviewed him in 2014. He saw individual behaviour change as a distraction and said the most important changes to get people to support were strategic, e.g.

  • Get out of coal
  • Accept new technology (e.g. wind farms)
  • Divest pensions from fossil fuels
  • Learn about the relative impacts of different sources of emissions

Allott was strongly of the view that climate communications should “emphasise the citizen role”. We should aim to empower people to know how to contribute to the big changes needed and then ‘do their bit’ in behaviour change as a “fun, communal, bonding, guilt-free activity”. I think there are important caveats for grassroots planning and messaging here.

The authors of one of the papers that I describe in my post Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning? propose that messaging should be seen as part of a larger ‘narrative’ that promotes a coherent strategy for decarbonisation. In other words, the development of a sound strategy comes first (ideally from government) and the narrative lets everybody know about it and gets them excited about contributing to it.

But what if the government or local authority hasn’t produced a convincing strategy or doesn’t seem to be producing a convincing implementation plan? Completing this post in the fallout from COP26, such questions seem only too relevant. One thing that we are trying to do as constructively as we can, here in South Yorkshire, is to contribute to the development of such strategies and plans. But I think that we all know that the pressure needs to be kept up on our elected representatives and being helpful and conciliatory may not communicate the necessary urgency. We come back to the importance of political campaigning and direct action, and to Margaret Klein Salamon’s challenge to gradualists: “Start by telling the truth, loudly and all the time.” Like Allott, she emphasises the systemic nature of the problem and calls for a “World War II scale transformation of the economy and society.” That’s the scale of change we need, not just a few more people having meat-free Mondays.

The case for being creative and experimental

Climate scientists have often struggled to convey the complexities of climate change. The case for adopting creative approaches has been made briefly in the table of ‘frames’ above and it is considered in more depth in my post Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning? In essence, creative and arts approaches can enhance engagement by appealing to the senses and emotions; they can be intriguing, enjoyable and memorable, especially when well planned and facilitated. They are perhaps sometimes seen as an amusing enrichment of standard campaigning methods.

But the case for their employment in this context is stronger than that: climate messaging and motivating needs to reach into people’s subconsciouses, to weave its way into different traditions and cultures, to transcend despair and inspire with magnificent hope.

If your group contains practitioners with artistic attitudes and skills, it may deepen your impact to work with them. Even if you don’t have such people to hand, you might consider adopting a deliberately experimental approach – taking an action research approach. None of us knows exactly how to bring about the sustainability transition. We are all on a learning journey and it might be most productive to recognise that explicitly, to identify a number of ‘enquiry questions’ relevant to your context, e.g.

  • What can we do that would really interest and engage people in such and such social group?
  • Would it improve our messaging to bring in a story-teller?
  • How could we use visuals to put our key messages across? What if we did a film project?
  • Is there any way we could tie this in with the street dance festival?
  • Could we learn a trick or two from Bake Off?
  • How can we make a safe space for people to talk honestly?
  • Who’s going to put together a great playlist for that event?

Hopefully, by identifying some enquiry questions, taking a chance on a range of creative approaches, and monitoring what you learn in the process, you will accumulate knowledge and improve your climate communication skills. You could even make it an explicit aim to contribute to knowledge beyond your own locality, to develop innovative materials and processes, monitor the impacts and record them to share with others. (If you decide to go in this direction, you may want to work in partnership with an academic researcher.)

In Should the arts, creativity and stories be at the heart of climate communications and campaigning? I offer a number of different perspectives on creative forms of communication. One perspective that is discussed concerns engagement and education for the video-games generation. Although I myself believe that nothing is so powerful as face-to-face communication, and that the best community outreach is based on actually wearing out some ‘shoe leather’, I may be out of date. Both the restrictions of the pandemic and the habits of the digital generation suggest that grassroots climate communicators might want to deliver parts of their programme through digital projects. Stephen Duncombe points out that we now live in the time of the ‘prosumer’, where ordinary citizens are making their own creative works and developing their own enterprises. Perhaps your group should be supporting people in the community to develop their own creative projects, rather than imposing your own (no-doubt lovely) ideas upon them?

Carbon Literacy

That said, there is something to be said for embracing existing approaches to climate awareness and education, both in terms of not reinventing the wheel unnecessarily and in terms of synergising with others in the region and across the country in a shared project to promote a ‘new normal’. If your steering group decides that it does want a standardised element to its programme,  Carbon Literacy would be the strongest contender, in my view. I like to describe it as something like ‘getting your First Aid’. It appears to be gaining in profile and popularity all the time. It has been extensively tried and tested. While it specifies, in the Carbon Literacy ‘standard’, the core information that it wants everybody to be taught, each organisation is explicitly encouraged to adapt the information to appeal to their particular audience; it thus has a strong backbone but also permits flexibility.

The Carbon Literacy Project, who coordinate the programme, have now produced a template that makes designing a one-day carbon literacy course considerably easier. They appear to be open to the idea of various possible permutations and might even be willing to accredit a course that was run through creative activities or activities out in nature, providing the focus remained clearly on the core knowledge specified.

However the programme does have its limitations. Although the term seems to have acquired currency, some community activists don’t like the name because they think it smacks of school and might put some people in the community off. The concept of one day’s training (or equivalent hours) is brilliant (because that level of time commitment seems feasible) but the reality is that it isn’t long enough to embed the knowledge, to talk through questions and doubts or to work out realistic personal action plans. In comparison, Carbon Conversations (a different programme) allocates a longer time (six two-hour sessions), and seeks to touch more bases – information about different aspects of our carbon footprints, action planning, time for discussion, time to process feelings, all in the solidarity of being in a group. But the trouble with Carbon Conversations is that in my experience, it is quite hard to recruit for; it looks too daunting, I think.[21]

Giving people the best chance of developing climate awareness probably means having a raft of interventions and offers, starting from quick, fun, no-strings introductory activities,  such as you might offer at a festival in a park, through to more formal courses such as Carbon Literacy, extending into something more like support and practice groups (e.g. Carbon Conversations) and even beyond that to academic study modules or practical training in environmentally-friendly trades.

Based on my experience of running a pilot Climate Conversations course at the University of Sheffield in 2020, participants (once through the door) welcome being given the time and support to learn and practice new skills. You need both information-based curricula and skill-based courses that enable people to put their knowledge into practice. It’s not just knowing the facts, it’s acting on them, in context.

Tips for climate communications practitioners working on the ground: a ladder of engagement

In this post I’m taking a helicopter view of climate communications. For detailed suggestions for practitioners, please see Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators. There you will find a rich smorgasbord of practical suggestions as well as examples of different approaches, with multiple references and sources. The emphasis is on gradualist principles which I have organised under six roughly chronological but overlapping headings. I was thinking about the process a person might go through with a campaigning group, from when they first encounter you through to (perhaps) becoming a committed activist or leader themselves.

  1. Approach: be clear about the intentions and values that run through all of your communications
  2. Engagement: get people’s attention / invite them in
  3. Rapport: connect / build a relationship
  4. Conversation: listen and learn
  5. Messaging: deliver reliable information appropriately / persuade
  6. Empowerment: inspire and enable people to take action
  7. Politicisation: support people into campaigning

I strongly recommend that grassroots climate communications practitioners read that companion piece and use it as a practical resource to keep dipping into. Strategic planners may find the above stages useful to bear in mind, too, alongside segmentation of the population, when designing their programme.

Appendix 1: Some questions for climate communications steering groups to consider.

Here are some questions you might like to consider when designing or reviewing your climate communications programme. I have ordered them according to the ladder of engagement mentioned above. (Some of them may make more sense in the light of the companion posts listed at the top of this paper.)

0. Your own gut responses to reading this paper
What stood out?
As you read through this paper, which things struck you as useful? 
Which things did you think were wrong or irrelevant?
What questions arose for you?  
1. Approach: be clear about the intentions and values that run through all of your communications
Aims and objectives.
What specifically (and realistically) does your group want to achieve? What/who do you want to look, sound and act different in 5 years time?
In terms of comms, what do you want to communicate to whom?

Theory of Change.
Which climate comms approach (if any) best aligns with your Theory of Change?
To what extent will your group be seeking to convey/impose its own strategy? To what extent will you be leaving community partners to set their own priorities and choose their own methods? How could you ‘co-produce’, rather than impose?

Values. What will be the values that underpin your programme?

Impartiality. A possible risk of setting out to respect the values and opinions of different community groups is relativism i.e. one opinion will be deemed to be as good as another. How impartial will your group be? Will it be frank about holding certain values and promoting a particular political or economic strategy? 

Community development.
Does your group plan to adopt a particular approach?
Do you buy my idea that working in groups should be central if you want to build solidarity and create a ‘new normal’?

Research. Does your group wish to advance learning in the field? How will it learn from its projects? Will it have a formal research strand? If so, does it need to have some academic partners on-board?  
2. Engagement: get people’s attention / invite them in
Arts and creativity.
Will these be central to the your approach? Or is there some other distinctive USP that the programme will have?

Practical skills. Might there be a strand of your programme that is action-based, teaching ‘how to do it’ technical sessions and/or developing a team of technical advisors (e.g. how to insulate your home)?

Working in nature. Is this an approach that your group wants to encourage – or even make central?

Digital versus face-to-face. Will your programme include a digital strand, not just for the delivery of your own messages, but to engage the video-game generation in creative projects?

Emotions. Some psychologists in the field are convinced that the only effective way to counteract disavowal is through making safe spaces for people to face up to the deep emotions that impede their engagement. Is that an approach your group would want to explore? If so, how could it be set up and how could people be drawn into willing participation?
Alternatively, if, like me, you see the logic but question the practicality of this approach, how could emotional sensitivity and support for eco-anxiety be built into your practical work? What are your safeguarding responsibilities here?

Training and outreach. Does your group want to have a training strand in its programme, training up community-based communicators?  
3. Rapport: connect / build a relationship
Segmentation. Which population groups within your area will you target and why? Which comms approach best suits each target group?

Authentic/trusted messengers. How will you find and nurture ‘trusted messengers’ for different target groups?  
4. Conversation: listen and learn
Critical thinking, philosophy and political literacy. 
Does climate education not challenge us all to think outside of our particular boxes, reflect deeply on our arguments, and question familiar political tactics? Will your group have a critical thinking and/or philosophical strand?
Will it seek to engage people in discussion about different political ideologies?
Will it encourage them to think about difficult choices – technical, logistical, financial, organisational, social, political, etc?
Might it even be part of your mission to explore different forms of participatory democracy (such as Citizens’ Assemblies)?  
5. Messaging: deliver reliable information appropriately / persuade
Frames.
Which frame(s) does your group want to adopt/focus on, and which not, and why?

Information. How will you teach or disseminate key climate knowledge? What will be your key facts and messages? Will they be specific to your geographical area? Do you need to have some scientific advisors on-board? 

Balancing urgency and agency, the ‘good news’ and the ‘bad news’. How will this be achieved? Might it be helpful to run workshops and/or training to explore how to achieve it in practice? 

Carbon Literacy. 
Does your group want to run an explicit Carbon Literacy programme? What are the pros and cons? Or something else in that vein?
 
6. Empowerment: inspire and enable people to take action
Leadership training.
One option would be a programme for young people; might that be something to consider?  
7. Politicisation: support people into campaigning
Political campaigning. 
Are you a campaigning organisation? Do you aim to influence those in power? If so, will there be a communication strand with that focus?

Politicisation. 
Is it your aim to politicise people?
What do you think of the Community Organising theory about starting from people’s self-interest and anger?
How would you present the aim of politicisation to funders who want to avoid ‘political’ groups? Could you be ‘impartial’ but also encourage active citizenship?  

Appendix 2: Principal sources

This paper and its companion pieces draw on a number of documents and/or webinars and websites. Please see the originals for more detail than I could include here. The main sources were:

Further points were drawn from the sources references in the footnotes to the various posts, and include:

Some observations come from my own experience delivering climate education activities,  such as Carbon Conversations and climate conversations courses. Some of the specific guidelines around climate conversations come from collaborative work undertaken within the Climate Communications Hub in Sheffield.


Notes

[1] Climate Outreach has built up a useful visual library: https://climatevisuals.org/

[2] Dupar, Mairi. (2019.) Communicating climate change: A practitioner’s guide. Insights from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Climate and Development Knowledge Network. Downloadable from:  https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/Communicating%20climate%20change_Insights%20from%20CDKNs%20experience.pdf

[3] https://climateoutreach.org/

[4] More detailed guidance can be found in my post Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators.

[5] I think this concept originally came from Joanna Macy.

[6] I have taken these points from two documents: (1) Behaviour change: the principles for effective interventions (NICE 2007): https://study.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/NICE%202007%20Behaviour%20change%20the%20principles%20for%20effective%20interventions.pdf; (2) The Challenge of Behaviour Change and Health Promotion by Glenn Laverack (2017) https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/8/2/25. I have quoted freely from both, rather than observing academic standards of reference. For further advice, see Behaviour change: general approaches (NICE 2007): https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/ph6/resources/behaviour-change-general-approaches-pdf-55457515717

[7] This is one of the core principles of the Carbon Conversations approach, which is described in more detail in Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators.

[8] I am sure there are useful models to draw on within the field of ‘community development’, that I don’t know about.

[9] I am aware that more research is going on into behaviour change methods, including the language that activists can use to enhance motivation. For a quick overview of the different factors that may be involved in promoting behaviour change, take a look at the behaviour change wheel here: http://www.behaviourchangewheel.com/

[10] The guide can be found here: https://www.carbonneutraluniversity.org/zero-carbon-university-guide.html  A short supplementary paper explaining the relevance of systems thinking can be found here: https://www.carbonneutraluniversity.org/uploads/5/0/7/2/50729279/embracing_systems_thinking_and_complexity.pdf

[11] Mindell, Arnold. (2002) The Deep Democracy Of Open Forums. Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc;  Charlottesville.

[12] Mann is also critical of any climate campaigner who appears to be promulgating a disaster scenario, calling such people ‘doomists’ and accusing them of spreading defeatism when they should be building optimism and determination.

[13] Documents such as The Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change and Laudato Si, written by the Pope, assert that their faiths call on human beings to be stewards of nature.

 [15] Keith Allott is critical of activists and campaigners who “do things” but don’t know what result they want to get! See: Politicisation: moving people into effective campaigning

[16] My list of ‘gradualist’ tactics is largely based upon two sources: a speech given at the World Symposium on Climate Change Communications at Manchester University in 2017 by Adriana Valenzuela from the Action for Climate Empowerment programme, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; and ‘Connecting on Climate Change’, a very useful guide produced by Eco-America in 2014. For further references please see Appendix 2 below.

[17] Fear-based appeals are discussed further in my post ‘Emergency mobilisation’: the heated debate about the harnessing of uncomfortable feelings – and some possible solutions.

[18] George Marshall – presentation to the Climate Communications Hub, Sheffield, November 2017.

[19] Hope for the Future: https://www.hftf.org.uk/

[20] One version of our cue card for climate conversations can be found in my post Practical Guidance For Climate Communicators, where I also say more about different types of message. A useful reference for key information messages is the document produced by Extinction Rebellion Scientists, Emergency on Planet Earth – Overview & Key Facts:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1twGDWTlRihMoShwXDTW0lItXnfwdo2U-miSSsOAl2wE/edit

[21] The two agencies leading on Carbon Conversations training in the UK are: http://www.carbonconversations.co.uk/ and https://www.surefoot-effect.com/carbon-conversations-community.html

How to lobby MPs constructively: the first step is to build rapport

The climate wasn’t the top priority in the Queen’s Speech. What can we who want to see rapid decarbonisation do now? 

The purpose of this blog is to share principles and practices that may be helpful for developing constructive political debate in this time of crisis. In my previous post I argued that what the country and the planet needed was a majority of MPs committed to addressing the climate and nature emergencies and competent to take on the complex task of planning and managing the transition to sustainability. But what is the outlook now? Johnson has made some public commitments but how deep do they go?

In the Queen’s Speech, Johnson announced an Environment Bill, as had been trailed in the Conservative manifesto. It repeats the government’s commitment to net zero carbon by 2050, a target Johnson reinforced in his election victory speech to his supporters: “In this election, you voted to be carbon neutral by 2050, and we’ll do it!” Knowing that he will be hosting COP26 in Glasgow in November, one might hope that Johnson genuinely wants to be seen as a world leader tackling the big issues of our times. The manifesto stated that the environment would be his top priority in his next budget. An increase in finance for the environment, a commitment to working with global partners to tackle deforestation and marine pollution, carbon capture and storage, £9.2 billion to invest in energy efficiency, a promise not to restart fracking unless science can show categorically that it is safe… all that looked good and is testimony not only to the impact made by climate activists but no doubt also to hard work behind-the-scenes by concerned Conservatives. 

But there are reasons to remain wary. Johnson didn’t turn up for the leaders’ debate on climate change on TV. He has reportedly given cabinet positions to climate sceptics. Brexit and his plans for the NHS may take priority over climate action. The target of 2050 is widely held by climate scientists to be far too late and in any case it is only for ‘net zero’, assuming that carbon capture and storage will be effective by then.

Moreover, even if Johnson is sincere in his intentions, he made clear in the manifesto that his approach would be market based: “Unlike Jeremy Corbyn, we believe that free markets, innovation and prosperity can protect the planet.” He certainly wasn’t accepting the proposition made by climate activists such as Naomi Klein and Kate Raworth that major systemic change is needed.[1]

And if environmental action is really to be the top priority for the next budget, why didn’t he present it as the defining aim of his administration which, of course, is what it should be? An optimistic reading of his mixed messages (and his jokey reference to carbon neutrality in his victory speech) is that he knows full well how important climate change is but dare not say so too loudly because the electorate is still more worked up about Brexit. A less optimistic reading is that he is merely trying to placate voters who are worried about the environment.

But we have to start from where we are. Undoubtedly activists will be stepping up the pressure with increased non-violent direct action. But there will also be manoeuvres within the system. For us as constituents, one thing that we can do is to hold Johnson to his promises by lobbying his MPs, drawing on the best communication skills we can muster. If indeed we want to see more constructive dialogue in politics, our starting point might well be that advocated by Stephen Covey: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”[2]

The top priority is to build a good working relationship.

An inspiring model of how to lobby MPs is being developed by a small but significant organisation, Hope for the Future, based in Sheffield where I live. They have been training constituents how to lobby their MPs using methods derived from ‘Non-Violent Communication’ (NVC). The core idea of NVC is that the way to build constructive dialogue with another person is to seek to understand their ‘needs’ – to see the situation from their point of view.[3] Over the last six years, Jo Musker-Sherwood, Sarah Robinson and their colleagues at Hope for the Future have been teaching constituents how to build a working relationship with their MPs, looking for overlaps between the MPs’ interests and the green agenda and they claim: “We have a proven track record transforming MPs’ hearts and minds on climate change – 100% of the MPs we work with go on to take one tangible climate-related action.”[4] One of the things that they do is to research an MP’s interests carefully before going to meet them. They prepare a short list of ‘asks’ but only produce them when and if they have managed to establish some degree of rapport;  the top priority is to build a good working relationship,  even if that means progress is a little slow.

The approach is realistic: you may not like or agree with this MP but that’s who you’ve got. Being aggressive won’t win them over, so you’d better look for interests in common. You may not get a climate denier to switch to whole-hearted support for the Paris climate agreement but you might find that they are willing to work on reducing air pollution from cars; at least that would be a shift in the right direction. And if you build a mutually respectful working relationship, there is a chance that you will be able to talk through your differences in due course. It’s a wise approach, and it’s tried and tested. (If you would like to know more about it,  there is plenty of information and guidance on Hope for the Future’s website.)

Following the Conservative win, and the influx of tens of new Conservative MPs to Westminster, I would suggest that Hope for the Future convene a conference for constituents from every Conservative constituency in the country to train them up for a country-wide effort. It’s worth a try. Environmental tipping points are looming and we’re going to need to get as many MPs on board in the next few months as we can.  Another useful resource that could be drawn on is the research undertaken by Climate Outreach in Oxford into the attitudes of the centre right and the messages to which they best respond.[5]

If, despite such efforts, the new government doesn’t put a credible plan for achieving sustainability in place within the next six months, those wanting to see a policy on the environment that is rational, moral and effective, may have to shift from the slow-burn NVC approach to something more assertive. Hope for the Future make clear that building rapport does not mean abandoning assertiveness; the skills are complementary. One of the texts that they quote from is “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss[6],  a former FBI agent who has worked extensively as a hostage negotiator. Interestingly, his approach is compatible with NVC in that he starts from the premise that you need to understand the emotions of a hostage taker and to build rapport with them. But clearly he also has a strong desire to influence the person and to get the result that he wants i.e. the release of the hostages with no loss of life. Many of his techniques can be applied in other situations and the environmental movement may well be advised to take note of them. What with the fires raging in Australia,  perhaps at last climate change is acquiring the salience, and thus the urgency, that it has long lacked. If our political representatives persist in dragging their feet, we may indeed need to call in the negotiators, people who have honed their skills in situations of intense conflict. After all, we couldn’t just let a mediocre and incompetent administration take us down the pan, could we? If Johnson doesn’t get a credible plan rapidly in place, he may find that he is dealing with assertive negotiators.

The need to bridge the disconnect between skilled experts and our elected politicians has never been stronger.

It is a strange thing that through all the argy-bargy of the last three years, there has been so little constructive reflection on the dialogue process itself. There have been honourable exceptions. But in general there has been too much noise, too little calm analysis, too little mature reflection. 

Why is this so? There are thousands of people – skilled experts! – who work as facilitators, negotiators, mediators, conflict resolution experts, social psychologists, counsellors, political analysts, political historians, etc. whose skills could and should be drawn on. The need to bridge the disconnect between these people and our elected politicians has never been stronger. Certainly in terms of the environmental crisis, and probably in terms of the social unrest we are witnessing across the world, democracy is going to have to be renewed if it is to survive and be squared with the necessity of rapid, coherent, international action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop sustainable infrastructure – long before 2050.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

If you share my interest in promoting constructive dialogue in the political arena, do follow me and let me know which individuals, organisations and campaigns you are finding most thoughtful, skilled and heartening. 

You can find an entertaining discussion about what to expect from the new government in the Sustainababble podcast #161: Five More Years, recorded the day after the election. [7]


[1] https://thischangeseverything.org/book/ and https://www.kateraworth.com/ 

[2] The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey (1999)

[3] https://www.cnvc.org/node/6856

[4] http://www.hftf.org.uk/about-us

[5] https://climateoutreach.org/resource-type/centre-right/

[6] A summary can be found here: https://www.freshworks.com/freshsales-crm/sdr-sales-development-reps/summary-of-never-split-the-difference-blog/ 

[7] http://www.sustainababble.fish/?p=951