The party’s rag-bag of populist policies, described as “post-ideological” because they lack core principles to bind them together, nevertheless out-flank the Tories. Any move to the right is bound to have serious consequences for climate change and environmental policies. Only today, Lib Dem Energy Secretary Ed Davey warned that: “Public support is chipped away if the populist politicians refuse to engage with the evidence of the science and just ignore it.

In the US, environmental views have become so polarised that they function as a reliable indicator of political views. But a new study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows quite how extreme this polarisation has become.

The researchers, led by Dena Gromet at the University of Pennsylvania, compared the views and behaviours of liberal and conservative voters. Their hypothesis was that an emphasis on the “environmental” credentials of products or policies might reduce their appeal to conservatives (who would not want to be associated with the left-ish connotations of environmental concern).

Policies aimed at carbon reduction – an issue most closely associated with environmental concern – produced a pronounced split based on political leaning. Conservative voters were strongly against, liberal voters strongly for. Other policies, such as reducing dependence on foreign oil or reducing energy costs, demonstrated the same, if less pronounced, ideological split.

A second test saw participants provided with money to purchase either an energy-efficient or old-style incandescent light bulb. They found that any label which mentioned or championed the environmental benefits of the bulb repelled conservative shoppers. Without such a label, they were happy to buy it.

The study is only the latest in a growing body of research that points to a consistent relationship between people’s political views and their willingness to engage with environmental issues like climate change.

A long-standing finding in social psychology is that for contentious issues (such as capital punishment), the very same information is likely to be processed in a biased way by people with different prior beliefs. Counter-intuitively, the same information, when assimilated into people’s existing views, prejudices and political preferences, can sometimes force people’s positions further apart, rather than closer together.

Because the politics of environmental issues like climate change are contested, so the “facts” of climate science are filtered through people’s existing beliefs. They are accepted or rejected based on their congruence with an individual’s values or their views about the structure of society.

Those with conservative political views are more likely to be opposed to many of the proposed policy solutions to climate change – regulation of industry, government campaigns to change behaviour, or taxation – and so work backwards to downplay or reject the seriousness of the underlying problem. For those on the left, these policy solutions are more acceptable, and so denial of the underlying problem is unlikely.

While the science around whether human activity is changing the climate is unequivocal, the closely related question “what should we do about it?” is deeply contested. As it should be – scientific descriptions of the risks posed by climate change cannot tell us how we should respond to them. This is a decision for society, of which the underlying science is only a part. Debate and disagreement about climate policy is not only inevitable but desirable in a democracy with pluralistic values. But there is an urgent need for climate change communicators to reach out across the political divide and find ways of engaging political conservatives.

As Gromet’s study demonstrates, by assuming that all sections of society respond in a uniform way to messages about the environment, there is a risk of a “green backlash” against policies viewed as favouring a particular ideological slant.

If political conservatives have so far not found environmental policies to their liking, then a priority for everyone who cares about climate change, whatever their political leaning, is to find a way of reconciling the values of the right with policy responses to climate change that are sustainable and just.

Otherwise – and the rise of UKIP suggests this may be closer than many assumed – the hard-won cross-party consensus on climate change in Britain, enshrined in the Climate Change Act, could be undone.

And that would be an outcome in no-one’s interest – left or right.

This post was originally published by Adam Corner on The Conversation, 21.05.13.

People who cut their carbon footprint because they’re worried about climate
change are ‘environmental’ types, right? They love ‘nature’ and get fired
up by those photos of polar bears stranded on melting ice. They might even
rate ‘protecting the environment’ or ‘respecting the earth’ as their number
one value.

Well, no; not necessarily.

As part of a research project on promoting lower-carbon lifestyles, I
interviewed people who have cut their carbon footprint because they’re
worried about climate change, to try and understand more about what
motivates them. Concern about ‘the environment’ for its own sake is not
generally their main reason for action. They tend to be more bothered about
the effects of climate change on poorer people in developing countries.
They’re often motivated by a deep sense of the injustice of a situation
where those who will suffer most are those who have contributed least to
the problem, and they talked in terms of trying to live with a fairer –
therefore smaller – share of the world’s resources.

When I asked them to imagine that we live in a different kind of world, one in which climate change would threaten polar bears with extinction but would somehow have little effect on humans, several interviewees said they would probably not be so anxious about the issue, and would not be trying so hard to address it.

Moreover, their stories about how they’d got engaged in climate change
action were about human rights groups and issues as often as environmental
ones. Sally said that because she believed that all the gains she’d worked
for in terms of women’s rights in developing countries were threatened, “it
was probably actually feminism which brought me into climate change.”
Deepta explained that many of her friends in her university Amnesty
International group were also involved in environmental campaigns so she
joined in with them too. David talked about growing up in South Africa,
where “you really had to have a view about what you thought of race
discrimination and so on.” This led to political and social awareness that
developed into concerns about many issues, including climate change.

It seemed to me that these were people who cared about the environment but
who cared even more about people and social justice. To check this, I asked
interviewees to answer a short questionnaire testing the strength of
‘biospheric’ (environment-centred), ‘altruistic’ (people-centred), and
‘egoistic’ (self-centred) values as guiding principles for their lives. The
top-rated value was ‘social justice’, with ‘equality’ second. ‘Protecting
the environment’ came third, and ‘respecting the earth’ was only sixth
(after being ‘helpful’ and ‘a world at peace’). The majority of
interviewees scored higher on the altruistic values scale than the
biospheric one. Not surprisingly, they scored egoistic values low.

I also asked interviewees “what images come to mind with the phrase ‘a
low-carbon lifestyle’?” Although many gave a list of things to do (or to do
without), some offered quite different ideas:

“For me it’s more local living, stronger communities, more time for each
other […] a less materialistic lifestyle where we don’t need to have so
much and hopefully meaning that we don’t need to work so much and have more
free time.” (Paul)

“Somehow I see sunshine. Yeah, lightness actually. Brightness and a sort of
small place to live. Gre
en grass and everything bright. There’s something
healthy about that. Healthy and wholesome I suppose.” (Aileen)

“Living really close to nature. I think that is the most dominant one.
That’s the one that makes me happy and that’s the one that makes me
inspired […] I think communities is another one. Connections with nature
and community living” (Deepta)

These aren’t images that would translate into ‘carbon reductions per year’.
They show that lower-carbon lifestyles are associated, at least for some
people, with a much broader vision of the good life’, and benefits such as
health, happiness, and community. This also seemed to be true for some of
the people who answered with the more typical list. For example, Claire
thought fewer cars on the streets would be “lovely” because people would
interact and not have to worry about traffic. Prue repeatedly stressed the
satisfaction she gains from cycling (“it’s not only that you are not using
resources, but you see a neighbour and you stop and say hello in a way you
don’t when you use the car”) and buying local produce (“you are eating
healthily, and you’re saving money”).

To me, perhaps the most remarkable finding was that some of these highly
motivated people weren’t even that keen to talk about climate change. They
thought the phrase was off-putting, or they were irritated by it because
it’s overused, or they were simply not that interested in climate change.
One person said she didn’t think you even have to believe in climate change
to want to live a lower-carbon lifestyle, because of the benefits you’d
gain from it.

These findings have important implications.

For example, appealing to altruistic values and to desires for things like
quieter streets and stronger local communities may be more effective ways
of encouraging people to change their behaviour than focussing on
information about climate change impacts on the natural world.

People who want to promote lower-carbon lifestyles might find it worth
working with human rights and development groups, and with organisations
that place emphasis on altruistic values, like many religious groups.
Development charities such as Oxfam and Christian Aid are already
campaigning on climate change, but more could be done to make links between
the concerns of organisations promoting women’s, children’s, and refugees’
rights and welfare and the potential impacts of climate change on these
groups.

The wide-ranging positive visions of what ‘a low-carbon lifestyle’ means to
people, and the fact that ‘climate change’ is not necessarily seen as
interesting suggests that action campaigns should promote a much broader,
more holistic view of a lower-carbon future, not just a ‘to do’ list to
‘combat climate change’. People do need information and advice about what
action they can take, but “Ten Tips to Save the Planet” type messages may
not be the best way of framing it – or not for everyone.

Obviously, these interviewees are not typical of the general population,
but if “It’s the environment, stupid!” is not a catchphrase that really
captures the range of motivations of even these committed people, the
approach it represents is probably even less likely to inspire widespread
behaviour change among the general public. Climate change is a complex
problem with social, economic, political and ecological dimensions. This
research suggests that it shouldn’t be framed merely as an ‘environmental’
issue by those who hope to engage the public in dealing with it.

All names used in this post have been changed.

If there’s something that the British like to talk about almost as much as the weather, it’s our health. When the two combine, they are guaranteed to create headlines. Both extreme heat and extreme cold have a predictable (if preventable) impact on health and mortality.

But although campaigners have struggled for years to fire the public imagination about climate change as an environmental problem, climate change is equally a serious public health issue. And, increasingly, there is evidence that framing climate change as a public health risk might be a better way of reaching beyond the green crowd and into the mainstream.

Could one reason for continuing public ambivalence about climate change be that it has lodged itself in the public consciousness as an environmental, rather than a health concern? A new paper published this month by Canadian researchers Francesca Cardwell and Susan Elliot is only the latest in a string of recent publications that have made exactly this point, arguing that unless more explicit links are made between health risks and climate change, public engagement will remain an uphill struggle.

Cardwell and Elliot found that few participants made an unprompted link between climate change and health. In another recent research study focusing on members of the American public, framing climate change as a public health issue elicited more positive engagement – emotions such as hope, for example – than framing it as an environmental or national security risk, even among individuals who were typically dismissive of climate change.

Studies like this suggest that when communicators explicitly make the links between climate change and health, the public is likely to listen. Put simply, health is one obvious way in which the abstract concept of climate change becomes real for people – one way in which climate change is manifested in our daily lives. So why isn’t the connection being made more frequently?

Some organisations are beginning to join the dots. The Health Protection Agency published a gargantuan report last year, describing in detail the health impacts of climate change in the UK. And at a recent event at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health, I took part in a workshop asking how the health impacts of climate change could be better communicated. It was clear that while there was huge potential for using the health impacts of climate change as a means of engaging the public, there was also a great deal that is not yet well understood.

For example, one way in which some sustainable behaviours can be promoted is by pointing to their co-benefits in terms of health. The obvious example is cycling – both a low-carbon and calorie-burning way of getting around. But what about sustainable behaviours that are not so good for your health? Turning the heating down in the winter is unlikely to be a positive health behaviour, especially for the elderly.

Climate change campaigns undoubtedly have lessons to learn from health practitioners. But although there is some evidence that the “social marketing” of health behaviours may be a useful guide for promoting sustainability, the transition is unlikely to be straightforward.

All of this suggests a more general point: climate change is not only – and is perhaps not even primarily – an environmental issue. Certainly, it is through the campaigns of environmental charities that the subject gained public awareness. But while concern about global temperatures may motivate some people to take action on climate change, most of us care about more tangible, local and concrete issues – with the health of our friends and family being an obvious example.

Health impacts – whether through flooding, increased droughts, or chaotic winter weather – are perhaps the primary way in which most people will experience climate change. And as previous research has shown, anything that can reduce the psychological distance between individuals and the abstract notion of climate change is likely to be an important tool for public engagement.

As a society, we are used to the idea of taking preventative action to ward off health risks, and there is an important lesson here for communicating climate change: the more that climate change can be presented as bad for our health, the more likely it is that folks beyond the keen-green crowd will take notice.

Uncertainty has played a central role in public debate about climate change – and how to communicate it – from the beginning.

However, the types of uncertainty open to public interrogation are tightly policed. For example, projections of future climate impacts are constructed under conditions of profound scientific uncertainty, meaning the process of defining a ‘dangerous’ limit is more of a social than a scientific judgment. Despite this, there has never been any attempt to involve the public in discussions about perhaps the most fundamental question of all: how much warming constitutes an acceptable risk.

Instead, the idea of a two degree dangerous limit has emerged as the end point target which defines the climate policy debate (Anderson and Bows, 2008). My research has shown that discussion of the two degree dangerous limit idea is largely ignored in the news media and where it is mentioned, it is constructed as scientific fact (Shaw, 2013), thereby denying the ostensibly free citizens of democratic societies the opportunity to engage in the most important and basic question about climate change.

I suggest that, in light of the failings of current policy frameworks to even slow the rate at which CO2 levels are rising, the climate problem should be ‘unstructured’.

A structured problem is one in which the dimensions have been predefined by a priori assumptions. Climate change has been structured as a phenomenon with a two degree dangerous limit. Removing the idea of a scientifically defined two degree dangerous limit would allow for a fuller socialization of the climate debate by legitimising the risk attitudes of the public, rather than framing the problem as one to be deliberated only by those in possession of complex climate science knowledge.

Including subjective attitudes to risk in the decision-making process has been identified as essential to the building of ‘meaningful environmental citizenship and participatory policy’ (Ockwell et al., 2009, p. 321). If claims of a two degree dangerous limit prove incorrect then public trust in climate science may be undermined, with negative consequences for public engagement (Boykoff et al., 2010). Conversely, by allowing citizens to become ‘both critics and creators in the knowledge production process’ (Rayner, 1987, p. 8), not only are the chances of finding a solution improved (Cash et al., 2003) but additionally, explicit public recognition of the social limits to climate science will ensure ‘continued scientific authority in the international climate regime’ (Lovbrand, 2004, p. 449).

What might such a properly deliberative process look like? It would begin by asking people what they would choose as a dangerous limit. Respondents would not need to be climate scientists in order to answer this question because the limit has not been defined through the interpretation of complex meteorological data. It is drawn from some broad brush stroke assumptions about what might happen at different levels of warming, as shown in reproductions such as the IPCC Burning Embers diagram. (Also, see here for more information on why two degrees has been chosen as a dangerous limit).

The most important determinants of the two degree limit are the social settings in which the deliberations are conducted. Under conditions of empirical uncertainty, such as those characterising climate change projections, institutional setting alongside social and political values come to play a determining role in defining what is considered ‘true’ (Johnson and Covello, 1987: 357).

Achieving group uniformity becomes an increasingly important determinant of decision making the greater the level of uncertainty. The groups that have defined the two degree dangerous limit are powerful political and technical actors. The idea of a limit has been defined according to the interests of those groups making the decisions.

What does climate change look like if the available information is interpreted by the values of citizens? The purpose of such an exercise would not be to agree a new ‘dangerous’ limit. Rather, it would be to allow publics to better understand the decision making process and see how uncertainty – rather than offering a reason for doing nothing – actually shows that there is not a single dangerous limit, the avoidance of which means safety from harmful climate impacts.

There are risks and uncertainty at any level of warming, but being honest about these will allow more meaningful public engagement, and ultimately, a more substantive and legitimate societal response.

References

Anderson, K., Bows, A., (2008). Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 366 (1882), 3863–3882.

Boykoff, M.T., Frame, D., Randalls, S., 2010. Discursive stability meets climate instability: a critical exploration of the concept of ‘climate stabilization’ in contemporary climate policy. Global Environmental Change 20, 53–64.

Cash, D.W., Clark, W.C., Alcock, F., Dickson, N.M., Eckley, N., Guston, D.H., Jaeger, J., Mitchell, R.B., (2003). Knowledge systems for sustainable development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100 (14), 8086–8091.

Johnson, B. and Covello, V. (Eds). (1987). The social and cultural construction of risk. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing.

Ockwell, D., Whitmarsh, L., O’Neill, S., (2009). Reorienting climate change communication for effective mitigation – forcing people to be green or fostering grassroots engagement? Science Communication 30, 305–327.

Rayner, S., (1987). Risk and relativism in science for policy. In: Johnson, B.B.,

Covello, V.T. (Eds.), The Social and Cultural Construction of Risk. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, pp. 5–23.

Shaw, C (2013). Choosing a dangerous limit for climate change. Public representations of the decision making process. Global Environmental Change. (In press). DOI 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2012.12.01

Turner, J. (1991). Social influence. Buckingham: Open University Press

Over the past decade, interest in the ‘science’ of communicating climate change has flourished. Psychologists, social marketers and campaigners have been united in the quest for systematic, reliable evidence with which to promote sustainable behaviour.

But while the science of climate change communication is clearly an essential piece of the puzzle, might there not be an ‘art’ to it too?

For individuals and organisations communicating climate change, it is easy to forget that most people don’t live their lives in a series of dislocated behaviours that can be influenced or nudged in a more sustainable direction. Ask yourself: what are the things that make you laugh, inspire you, or fill your conversations with friends? For most of us, the answer will involve culture, not cognition.

It follows that mobilising our cultural and creative resources might be as important for public engagement with climate change as technological or political changes – and there is evidence that this is starting to happen. To take one topical example, the charity Do The Green Thing (a reliably creative and unpredictable group) are publishing a series of posters by a leading artist throughout March, under the heading of “creativity versus climate change”. These are not po-faced posters, but playful provocations – and they stick in your mind for that reason.

A conference planned for June in Aberystwyth will focus on the potential for syntheses between science and art in responding to climate change. Uncivilisation, a music, literature and storytelling festival (organised by a network of writers, artists and thinkers in search of “new stories for troubled times”) is now in its fourth year. The campaign group Platform continues to oppose BP’s links with the Tate Gallery by using innovative methods like alternative audio tours, which challenge the legitimacy of oil-sponsored culture.

And organisations like Artists Project Earth (a group of artists, scientists, journalists, environmentalists, film makers and authors) have been working for many years to support climate change and environmental campaigning.

But given the importance of the issue, it is surprising how little overlap there has been between the social science of climate change communication and the creative world.

That art provides a vehicle for bringing dry political sentiment to life is certainly not a new observation – but save for a few notable exceptions, there has been a gaping hole where creative energy should be.

Climate change theatre and films are thin on the ground. The situation is barely any different in the world of literature and storytelling. While there are a handful of examples of climate change-oriented novels, it does not seem to have fired the imagination of authors. But while the potential for storytelling to make the invisible, often abstract concept of climate change tangible has so far evaded novelists, some climate change communication projects are starting to explore the territory.

A set of beautifully shot films telling the stories of people’s lives affected by the changing climate in the US state of Wisconsin are an eye-catching entry point to a set of educational materials designed to aid teaching about climate change.

And closer to home, a project aimed specifically at overcoming the limitations of conventional climate change communication strategies (ie that they tend to reach only a very narrow group of the population) offers an exciting blend of art and social science.

Named the Aspects project, it represents an attempt to connect discussion about climate change to people’s everyday lives through the medium of digital storytelling.

The Aspects website hosts a series of short films, featuring people who have a story to tell about their lives, about the weather, about their local communities – and indirectly about climate change.

What’s interesting about the Aspects approach is that while the medium appeals on a cultural level – films, storytelling, and anecdotes about the world around us – the films are also putting into practice good principles of climate change communication. The abstract, invisible nature of climate change is rendered real through everyday stories, while the fact that the storytellers are members of the public, rather than activists or campaigners, creates a positive social norm.

Typically, the challenge of climate change communication is thought to require systematic evidence about public attitudes, sophisticated models of behaviour change and the rigorous application of social scientific research. All of this is true, but it is human stories, not carbon targets, that capture people’s attention.

The science of climate change communication is essential to engage people’s minds, but the art of engaging people’s imaginations may be just as important.

Against a backdrop of lukewarm sentiment about environmental issues globally, levels of concern about climate change in Wales are at their highest for many years.

In a poll of 1,001 people by Cardiff and Aberystwyth Universities published on Monday, 85% reported being either fairly or very concerned about the risks of climate change, while 88% agreed that the climate was changing – levels not seen in British opinion polls since the mid 2000s.

The authors of the study reported a number of findings that can be compared directly to previous studies of the UK public as a whole. When identical questions were asked in a UK-wide survey in 2010, notably lower levels of belief in the reality of climate change and concern about its effects were observed.

The survey was conducted at the end of 2012, just after serious flooding swept across the nation, and the results reveal what looks like a significant impact of the floods on people’s views about climate change. Across the sample as a whole, 65% agreed that the country was already feeling the effects of climate change. But the researchers surveyed an additional number of people in an area that was particularly affected by flooding (around Ceredigion). Among this group, the figure rose to 74%.

The Welsh study is not the first to point to a link between weather events and perceptions of climate change. A recent analysis of US public opinion over two decades found a clear and consistent relationship between average temperatures and belief in the reality and seriousness of climate change. The study even put a figure on the impact of seasonal weather on climatic beliefs: for every degree above the average temperature experienced over the past 12 months, there was a 7.6% increase in agreement that the world was warming.

So as the impacts of climate change in the UK start to hit home, we might expect to see weather-related variation in the number of people expressing concern about climate change. But as recent comments by Boris Johnson illustrate, this is a double-edged sword. In a recent Telegraph column, the London mayor suggested that the snow outside of his window was a reason to question the reality of global warming.

An important question is the extent to which these latest findings can be extrapolated to the rest of the UK. On the one hand, the timing of the floods is likely to have had a big effect – and so the salience of climate change in flood-ravaged areas of rural Wales may not be mirrored in urban centres across the British Isles.

But many other parts of the UK also experienced flooding around this time, and previous research has suggested that experiencing flooding can increase both people’s willingness to act on climate change, and their concern about the underlying problem.

Of course, it is not possible to construct a direct causal link between any single weather event and climate change. The best that scientists can do is give an estimate of how much more likely, or more severe, a particular weather event will become as the climate changes. The weather presents a paradox for climate change communicators: day-to-day weather is not a good guide to climatic changes at a global level, but it is the only way that most of us will ever experience the climate.

That it takes a situational trigger like flooding to stimulate concern about climate change is perhaps unsurprising – globally, the issue is simply not at the top of most people’s agenda, and it is routinely ranked as less important than the economy, health, or education. Similarly, the power of personal experience to override even repeated statements about facts and figures is well documented – so localised weather is likely to continue to play a central role in the way the public thinks about climate change.

The Welsh experience of flooding in 2012 seems to have acted as a catalyst for concern about climate change, fortunately without any reported loss of lives. But reflection on the relationship between extreme weather and perceptions of climate change raises a troubling question: if it takes a flood, hurricane or heat wave to make climate change a reality, might we not be leaving things a little late?

Sometimes, simple ideas have far-reaching implications, and the Common Cause report – which created ripples throughout the charity sector in 2012 is a perfect example of this. The central argument in Common Cause is deceptively simple: there is a cluster of values like concern for the welfare of others, that underpins social and environmental concern. Any campaign that does not seek to support or nurture these values risks undermining the common cause that links all organisations working for a fairer, more sustainable world.

While it may be advantageous in the short term for an environmental charity to emphasise the financial benefit of household energy saving measures, this will do nothing to build public support for tackling climate change. Evidence suggests it may actually backfire, reinforcing the values that undermine social and environmental concern.

Common Cause presents a robust challenge to the status quo of charity campaigning (increasingly built around superficial monetary transactions, rather than more substantive engagement), the arguments have for the most part fallen on receptive ears. After all, if there is a part of society that would be expected to understand the value of working together to achieve a shared, common purpose, it is the charity sector. But can the same be said for the corporate world?

Competition is a principle at the heart of capitalism. A company may take significant steps towards improving the sustainability of its supply chain. But ultimately, it is seeking to gain a bigger market share than its competitors. It is not looking to share.

A small minority of brands (such as Patagonia) have begun to raise really difficult questions for the corporate sector – not just consuming differently, but consuming less. While these companies clearly take sustainability more seriously than most, they are still seeking to increase their market share. In short, they are still in competition. Could the private sector ever conceivably develop a common cause around sustainability, based on co-operation not competition?

One challenge that many businesses with sustainability goals have in common is how to encourage their customers to act on the sustainability guidance they give them. A drinks company will want their products to be recycled; a clothing company may encourage their customers to use less energy in the washing process.

In exactly the same way that charity and governmental campaigns on climate change have targeted specific behaviours – switching off lights, or unplugging phone chargers – detached from the context in which they occur, businesses currently focus exclusively on the single issue related to their product.

Perhaps, the common cause for corporations seeking to make real progress on sustainability would mean investing their significant communications resources in engaging their customers around climate change and sustainability, but without these campaigns being linked to a particular product or sales pitch.

The payback, from the perspective of the companies investing in such a strategy, would be that each individual behaviour they wished to promote – recycling or washing clothes at a colder temperature – would be made more likely by a common determinant: the values, beliefs and identities that underpin all of their customers’ behaviours.

Once a critical mass of companies were committed legally, morally, and institutionally to sustainability goals that were predicated on selling less, making things that lasted longer and expected to be fixed rather than replaced, could companies conceivably promote public engagement with climate change for the good of the sector as a whole?

This currently inconceivable approach would not be the end of the story however. As Tom Crompton, the author of the original Common Cause report has explained, there is also an internal challenge for companies that are serious about sustainability:

“The marketing industry has a particular responsibility to examine the impact of its activities on cultural values [but] a company’s management culture, the incentives it offers its employees, and its contribution to public priorities through the lobbying activities of its trade associations, are all likely to have crucial impacts on cultural values. It is quite conceivable that these factors – hitherto largely ignored in the debate on sustainable business practice – may be of far greater environmental significance than the direct material impacts of a particular range of products or services.”

There is a mountain to climb before the corporate sector could even begin to start thinking about developing a common cause around sustainability. If ultimately, the secret to a truly engaged public and genuinely sustainable society is the promoting and nurturance of values like altruism, above and beyond competitiveness, is there any choice but to start the ascent?

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Deadline for applications: 5pm, Monday 4 March

In California, the farmers who raise cattle and cultivate the Central Valley’s diverse mix of orchards, vineyards, and row crops are well-aware of how dependent they are on favorable climatic conditions. As one grower puts it, “Agriculture is more vulnerable to climate change than anyone who is not a farmer can even imagine”. Helping farmers anticipate and adapt to changes in the local climate is therefore vital to preserving rural livelihoods and safeguarding global food security.

With the implementation of California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act now underway, local farmers are also being asked to consider their role in the state’s carbon footprint. Since agriculture in California accounts for roughly 6–7 % of total greenhouse gas emissions, state agencies have opted for a voluntary approach to mitigating emissions from agriculture compared to mandatory reductions from the industrial and transportation sectors. This reliance on voluntary action by farmers raises the question – What motivates them to mitigate and adapt to climate change?

To answer this question our research team worked with local stakeholders in the Central Valley to conduct a survey that examined farmers’ experiences, perspectives, and behaviors related to climate change. Our questions covered a range of topics including; i) farmers’ past experience with local climate impacts (e.g. changes in temperature and water availability), ii) their beliefs about the existence, causes, and risks of climate change, iii) their concerns for global and local impacts on agriculture, and ultimately iv) their willingness to adopt various mitigation and adaptation practices.

As it turns out, what motivates a farmer to take action is quite different if the goal is reducing the emissions that cause climate change (i.e. mitigation), as opposed to coping with the consequences (i.e. adaptation). Perhaps more importantly, the specific concerns that motivate each response depend heavily on whether the risks of climate change are framed in a global or local context.

To understand the distinction between global and local framing we drew on several recent psychological studies that apply Construal Level Theory (i.e. the level at which people ‘construe’ ¬the problem) to environmental decision making and behavior. In particular, work by Alexa Spence at the University of Nottingham and several of her colleagues at Cardiff University recognized that the “psychological distance of climate change” has strong implications for what experiences and attitudes motivate people to respond to climate change. They observed that the impacts of climate change can be perceived in either a psychologically distant or proximate mindset (i.e. distant = high level construal and close = low level construal). This conceptual framework was then used to understand how personal experience with flooding helped to motivate people in the UK to reduce their energy use and thus mitigate emissions.

Our work, which looks at the psychological distance of climate change through the eyes of a California farmer, goes one step further by considering the subtle difference between mitigation and adaptation goals. We found that past experience alone did not directly motivate climate action among farmers. Instead, the effect of past experience on behavior was mediated by their level of concern for either the local or global impacts on agriculture.

Moreover, we also observed that the attitudes motivating mitigation and adaptation behaviors tend to be cognitively represented at different construal levels – with psychologically distant “global concerns” driving mitigation and more proximate “local concerns” spurring adaptation. For instance, farmers who expressed concern about the global impacts of climate change on agriculture were more willing to adopt mitigation practices such as using energy and fertilizers more efficiently. In contrast, those who were concerned about local impacts, particularly on water availability, were more motivated to adapt by implementing improved irrigation practices.

So what might explain these results? We think it’s likely due to the fact that mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is a classic collective action problem that cannot be solved by the actions of one person alone. It requires cooperation on a global scale. Also, the outcome our personal efforts to reduce emissions are diffused globally and thus difficult to see firsthand. As such, the concerns and behaviors linked to mitigation tend to be psychologically distant.

In contrast, farmers who anticipate local climate impacts and take specific measures to adapt can often see tangible evidence of their efforts. Thus, the concerns and behaviors motivating adaptation are psychologically closer than those which influence mitigation. This example from agriculture also underscores the fact that both cooperative and self-interested behaviors will each be necessary if we hope to address the causes and consequences of climate change.

So for those of us who are interested in more effectively engaging farmers (and the broader public) in initiatives to mitigate and adapt to climate change, our study offers several conclusions to consider:

1. Keep the messages on mitigation and adaptation strategies focused on their respective global and local spheres. The real value of this approach is that people pay closer attention to messages that match attitudes with desired behavior according to their psychological distance.

2. Develop information resources that equip farmers to identify and address local climate-related impacts. This approach strengthens local adaptive capacity because individuals who are operating in a psychologically proximate mindset will tend to pursue feasible goals that they perceive as being effective for dealing with problems near at hand.

3. Use messages that emphasize the societal benefits of mitigation rather than fear of personal consequences. This is important because the main benefits of farmers’ efforts to mitigate emissions are diffused globally and thus may not directly benefit their crops or economic returns.

4. Remember that many farming practices have complex ramifications for both mitigation and adaptation. This means that climate change initiatives should be designed to help farmers weigh the mix of benefits and tradeoffs that generally accompany new farming practices.

Even if we eventually achieve the mitigation targets set by the Kyoto Protocol, our past emissions will continue to impact the climate for many decades to come. Therefore, we may want to pay close attention to the common wisdom of our California farmer when he emphasizes that we “need to be thinking about mitigation and adaptation” in our future policy and outreach initiatives.

This is what I was asked by a thoughtful person who is assisting climate-science communicators to develop strategies for helping the public to recognize the best available evidence–so that those citizens can themselves make meaningful decisions about what policy responses best fit their values.

So below are the person’s questions (more or less) and my responses, and I welcome others to offer their own reactions.

1. What is the most important influence or condition affecting the efficacy of science communication relating to climate change?

In my view, “the quality of the science communication environment” is the single most important factor determining how readily ordinary people will recognize the best available evidence on climate change and what its implications are for policy. That’s the most important factor determining how readily they will recognize the best available scientific evidence relevant to all manner of decisions they make in their capacity as consumers, parents, citizens—you name it.

People are remarkably good at figuring out who knows what about what. That is the special rational capacity that makes it possible for them to make reliable use of so much more scientific knowledge than they could realistically be expected to understand in a technical sense.

The “science communication environment” consists of all the normal, and normally reliable, signs and processes that people use to figure out what is known to science. Most of these signs and processes are bound up with normal interactions inside communities whose members share basic outlooks on life. There are lots of different communities of that sort in our society, but usually they all steer their respective members toward what science knows.

But when positions on a fact that admits of scientific investigation (“is the earth heating up?”; “does the HPV vaccine promote unsafe sex among teenage girls?”) becomes entangled with the values and outlooks of diverse communities—and becomes, in effect, a symbol of one’s membership and loyalty in one or another group—then people in those groups will end up in states of persistent disagreement and confusion. These sorts of entanglements (and the influences that cause them) are in effect a form of pollution in the science communication environment, one that disables people from reliably discerning what is known to science.

The science communication environment is filled with these sorts of toxins on climate change. We need to use our intelligence to figure out how to clean our science communication environment up.

2. If you had three pieces of advice for those who are interested in promoting more constructive engagement with climate change science, what would they be?

A. Information about climate change should be communicated to people in the setting that is
most conducive to their open-minded and engaged assessment of it.

How readily and open-mindedly people will engage scientific information depends very decisively on context. A person who hears about the HPV vaccine when she sees Michelle Bachman or Ellen Goodman screaming about it on Fox or MSNBC will engage it as someone who has a political identity and is trying to figure out which position “matches” it; that same person, when she gets the information from her daughter’s pediatrician, will engage it as a parent, whose child’s welfare is the most important thing in the world to her, and who will earnestly try to figure out what those who are experts on health have to say. Most of the contexts in which people are thinking about climate change today are like the first of these two. Find ones that are more like the second. They exist!

B. Science communication should be evidence-based “all the way down.”

The number of communication strategies that plausibly might work far exceeds the number that actually will. So don’t just guess or introspect, & don’t listen to story-tellers who weave social science mechanisms into ad hoc (and usually uselessly general) “how to” instructions!

Start with existing evidence (including empirical studies) to identify the mechanisms of communication that there is reason to believe are of consequence in the setting in which you are communicating.

But don’t guess on the basis of those, either, about what to do; treat insights about how to harness those mechanisms in concrete contexts as hypotheses that themselves admit of, and demand, testing designed to help corroborate their likely effectiveness and to calibrate them.

Finally, observe, measure, and report the actual effect of strategies you use. Think how much benefit you would have gotten, in trying to decide what to do now, if you had had access to meaningful data relating to the impact (effective or not) of all things people have already tried in the area of climate science communication. Think what a shame it would be if you fail to collect and make available to others who will be in your situation usuable information about the effects of your efforts.

Aiding and abetting entropy is a crime in the Liberal Republic of Science!

C. Don’t either ignore or take as a given the current political economy surrounding climate
change; instead, engage people in ways that will improve it.

Public opinion does not by itself determine what policies are adopted in a democratic system. If “public approval” were all that mattered, we’d have adopted gun control laws in the 1970s stricter than the ones President Obama is now proposing; we’d have a muscular regime of campaign finance regulation; and we wouldn’t have subsidies for agriculture and oil producers, or tax loopholes that enable Fortune 500 companies to pay (literally) zero income tax.

The “political economy climate” is as complex as the natural climate, and public opinion is only one (small) factor. So if you make “increasing public support” your sole goal, you are making a big mistake.

You also are likely making a mistake if you take as a given the existing political economy dynamics that constrain governmental responsiveness to evidence and simply try to amass some huge counterforce (grounded in public opinion or otherwise) to overcome them. That’s a mistake, in my view, because there are things that can be done to engage people in a way that will make the political economy forces climate-change science communicators have to negotiate more favorable to considered forms of policymaking (whatever they might be).

Where to engage the public, how, and about what in order to improve the political economy surrounding climate change are all matters of debate, of course. So you should consult all the evidence, and all the people who have evidence-informed views, and make the best judgment possible. And anyone who doesn’t tell you that this is the thing to do is someone whose understanding of what needs to be done should be seriously questioned.

This post was originally published on www.culturalcognition.net, on 29th January, 2013.