Category: Reports

Source: Climate Outreach

Author(s): Chris Shaw, Adam Corner, Jamie Clarke

Year: 2017

Excerpt:

A narrow visual vocabulary currently determines climate change in the public mind: polar bears, melting ice-caps, smokestacks and – as the results of our Climate Visuals research show – potentially polarising images of environmental protesters. This can undermine the effectiveness of campaign messages by failing to engage audiences, and can detract from the reach and value of journalistic reporting on climate change.
This report presents results from the ongoing Climate Visuals programme, which aims to improve understanding of how to effectively engage people using visual images and ultimately catalyse a new visual language for climate change. Our Climate Visuals approach is based on 7 key principles for visual climate change communication derived from international social research (see Appendix 1 for a list of the principles).

The annual United Nation’s COP meetings serve as the key annual moment in the climate change calendar and are therefore central to widening the visual vocabulary of climate change. We wanted to provide concrete, tangible and practical suggestions for how to tell more compelling visual stories on climate change at COP 22 and beyond. Initially we undertook an analysis of imagery from COP21 (Paris, December 2015). This formed the basis of a workshop with climate change communicators and journalists held in Marrakech during COP22 (November 2016). This supplementary report couples our analysis of COP21 imagery with an analysis of images from COP22, providing the opportunity to identify any shifts in the imagery being used, or determine whether the issues identified in the COP21 analysis still dominated the coverage of COP22.

Talk.Eco encourages readers to visit the Climate Visuals site to fully explore the principles in this guide.

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