Resources for Environmental and Sustainability Communicators
Greta Thunberg has clearly inspired a momentous youth movement, but many young adults who are aware of the urgency of climate change are yet to fully immerse themselves into the new wave of climate campaigning. Young campaigners have been telling us they want to reach beyond the usual suspects of young middle-class environmentalists. Our research with young campaigners revealed that...
Weathercocks and Signposts… advocated communicating and campaigning on the basis of a deep and imperative love for the natural world as one of many roots to inspiring environmental concern. But it also highlighted definite limits to the kind of arguments that we should make. It made the case that we should seek to widen public support for our aims by...
The European Perceptions of Climate Change project (EPCC) provides insights into public attitudes towards climate change and energy transitions across France, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom. In an initial report, the project detailed the socio-political context relevant to understanding perceptions of climate change in each of these nations. A second report summarises the key findings from an international representative...
Our wildlife matters…but so do our words. This guide will show that our choice of words is just as important as any other decision we make in conservation. The guide will explain what framing is and how we can use it to create a better world for wildlife. If we communicate with an understanding of framing we are more likely...
Effective communications requires reflecting and responding to different audiences, and tailoring messaging to the values of each audience. NGOs and financiers have different values and therefore use different narratives, often with entirely different vocabularies. Policymakers – especially those in government and multilateral development agencies – tend to sit between the two sectors, adopting some of the NGO concerns about social...
As several decades of awareness-raising and initiatives to engage the public have shown, climate change doesn’t communicate itself. A burgeoning evidence base on the social science of climate change communication now provides many explanations for why engaging on climate change can be challenging. Climate science is filled with uncertainties, a notorious stumbling block for communicating with non-scientists. For some, the...
This handbook provides a brief history of the consensus on climate change. We’ll summarize the research quantifying the level of scientific agreement on human-caused global warming. We’ll examine what the public thinks about the consensus, and the misinformation campaigns that have sought to confuse people. We’ll look at how we should respond to misinformation and how best to communicate the...
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...
A large body of research shows that people need to understand climate change as a narrative, containing their own language and shaped by their own values and experience. Most climate change language however is dry, technical or too based in the campaign culture of the Global North. To date, there has been very little research into effective climate change communications...
To accompany this year’s UK Climate Coalition Show the Love campaign, which we helped shape, we’ve created a new practical guide, “Public engagement with climate change post-Brexit: a centre-right perspective”, in collaboration with the Climate Coalition. Many climate campaigners and communicators consistently state that they struggle to have conversations with people of centre-right values – in response, our new guide...
