Overview

Communicating climate change

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What is the best way to create written or spoken mater­ials that really inspire people?

Language  is abso­lutely crit­ical to com­mu­nic­ating effect­ively about cli­mate change, and Talking Climate con­tains a series of guides to effective cli­mate change communication.

Individual words and longer phrases are important – avoiding jargon, and knowing how an audi­ence is likely to respond to par­tic­ular terms is essen­tial. This guide describes the most effective methods for com­mu­nic­ating cli­mate change.

But effective com­mu­nic­a­tion is about more than just picking the right words – the way mes­sages are framed, the values they speak to and the nar­rat­ives that bring the cli­mate change mes­sage alive are incred­ibly powerful. Getting to grips with the growing body of research on how to use framing to effect­ively target par­tic­ular atti­tudes and beha­viours is essential.

Many cli­mate change com­mu­nic­ators spend a great deal of time coun­tering the argu­ments of those who do not accept the sci­ence of cli­mate change. However, there is now a growing body of evid­ence that cli­mate change scep­ti­cism is not really about cli­mate sci­ence – it is about people’s polit­ical view­points and world­views, which the sci­ence of cli­mate change seems to chal­lenge. This guide describes the social sci­ence research that is get­ting to the bottom of the real reasons for cli­mate scep­ti­cism, while this sec­tion out­lines the key mes­sages from studies of public per­cep­tions of cli­mate change.

The media are an important influ­ence on public atti­tudes towards cli­mate change, and this guide provides an intro­duc­tion to media reporting on cli­mate change, while the most effective ways of using images to com­mu­nicate cli­mate change are out­lined here. And our com­pre­hensive list of cli­mate change com­mu­nic­a­tion resources avail­able online con­tains a number of essen­tial resources for cre­ating effective written or spoken materials.