Communicating climate change during the Covid-19 crisis: what the evidence says 2020 The world has changed and climate advocates are having to change with it, adapting plans and campaigns to a profoundly new external environment. Timing and sensitivity are paramount in communicating climate change during Covid-19 – otherwise the climate sector risks undermining climate action for the long term. So...
From photos to video — 10 principles to communicate climate change 2019 What comes to mind when you think about climate change? Polar bears perhaps? Melting ice caps? But do these images make climate change feel relevant to your life? Do they motivate you to take action? Research indicates that for most audiences these images have the opposite effect. Together...
Which Farm Animal Photos are Most Likely to Inspire People to Eat Vegan: A Reanalysis 2018 This document presents a reanalysis of the data and the conclusions reported by Humane League Labs on January 25, 2015, in the blog post titled Report: Which farm animal photos are most likely to inspire people to eat vegan? Using regression analysis of the...
Climate Visuals: Towards a new visual language for COP22 and beyond: Supplementary report: A comparison of images from COP21 and COP22 2017 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...
Climate Visuals: Towards a new visual language for climate change: An evidence-based Briefing for COP22 and beyond. 2016 Despite the energy and resources our community dedicates to communication strategies for written and spoken campaign materials, the amount of research on how to effectively engage people using visual images of climate change is much more limited. As a result, an easily-recognisable...
Climate Visuals 2016 Every day, thousands of images of climate change are shared around the world. But while research on the verbal and written communication of climate change has proliferated, our understanding of how people interpret visual images of climate change is limited to a much smaller number of academic studies, which do not provide much in the way of...
Making the Case: Winning Messaging for Energy Efficiency 2015 Americans love energy efficiency. Poll after poll shows that overwhelming majorities of Americans have positive feelings about energy efficiency. So why aren’t there more policies in place to support this popular clean energy strategy? The answer also lies in those polls: While energy efficiency is viewed positively, people generally think it...
Photojournalism as a Vehicle for Public Engagement with Climate Change 2015 The power of photographs to engage the public with multifaceted, complex issues of global scope such as war, hunger, and terrorism has been widely discussed and researched by media and social studies. However, all too often images accompanying “environmental” stories in the news are chosen according to worn out...
What works – and what doesn’t – for engaging people on climate change 2015 This Special Report from the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS) is a synthesis of key findings from a cluster of PICS funded Social Mobilization research projects, conducted in British Columbia (BC) during 2010 – 2014. This report explains “what works” and “what doesn’t work” in...
The Uncertainty Handbook: A Practical Guide for Climate Change Communicators 2015 If you have ever struggled with the communication of uncertainty, then this handbook is for you. It distills the most important research findings and expert advice into a few pages of practical, easy- to-apply techniques providing scientists, policy-makers and campaigners with the tools they need to communicate more effectively...
