Guide

Visual communication of climate change

Images are powerful com­mu­nic­a­tion tools – but they have proven to be some­thing of a sticking point for cli­mate change com­mu­nic­ators. This is because for most audi­ences in indus­tri­al­ised nations, cli­mate change is some­thing vague, abstract and very dif­fi­cult to visualise.

In the UK, for example, it is dif­fi­cult to point to any easily visu­al­ised impacts of cli­mate change that have already occurred. The sea­sons are chan­ging, and (like every­where else) average tem­per­at­ures are gradu­ally rising, but it is dif­fi­cult to detect this without studying the weather and cli­mate carefully.

Attempts to create artists’ impres­sions of what the future impacts of cli­mate change will be have often been met with deri­sion from cli­mate scep­tics for being alarmist. But per­haps more import­antly, cli­mate change com­mu­nic­a­tion spe­cial­ists have ques­tioned whether apo­ca­lyptic images of major cities under­water or storm surges are actu­ally doing more harm than good.

Because mean­ingful images of cli­mate change in indus­tri­al­ised coun­tries are hard to come by, many com­mu­nic­ators have looked for visual evid­ence where the impacts of cli­mate change are already being felt – such as in drought-prone or low-lying devel­oping coun­tries, or the polar ice caps. Particularly pop­ular images used by cam­paigners include the polar bear, and starving children.

However, while these images have the virtue of being genuine rep­res­ent­a­tions of the impacts of cli­mate change (rather than artists’ impres­sions of the future), they have also been cri­ti­cised by cli­mate change com­mu­nic­a­tion experts as being geo­graph­ic­ally (and psy­cho­lo­gic­ally) dis­tant from the audi­ence being com­mu­nic­ated to. Put bluntly, why should people in wealthy, indus­tri­al­ised nations care about starving chil­dren in Somalia or the plight of polar bears? Certainly some people do – but these are likely to be the people who are already engaged with cli­mate change. Using visual imagery to reach beyond the usual sus­pects is more difficult.

There is now some aca­demic research that has looked spe­cific­ally at the effect of using dif­ferent images to rep­resent cli­mate change on public con­cern and per­cep­tions. Saffron O’Neill and Sophie Nicholson-Cole (2009) found that images that induced fear (such as envir­on­mental refugees, or ‘drowning’ polar bears) were good for attracting atten­tion, but inef­fective at motiv­ating genuine per­sonal engage­ment (i.e. doing some­thing about it!) This result fits with other research on using fear to motivate per­sonal engage­ment with cli­mate change.

Un-threatening images that linked to people’s everyday actions and con­cerns were more effective – and this finding links dir­ectly to work on social norms to pro­mote sus­tain­able beha­viour. Showing people pic­tures of other people (‘like them’) enga­ging in mean­ingful sus­tain­able beha­viours (rather than scaring them with apo­ca­lyptic images) is likely to be a more pro­ductive way of motiv­ating sus­tain­able behaviour.

In a paper assessing how cli­mate change has been visu­ally rep­res­ented ‘beyond polar bears’, Kate Manzo (Manzo, 2010) sug­gested that the dom­inant altern­at­ives to fear-laden images have tended to be renew­able energy and pic­tures of dif­ferent weather states. There are also prob­lems with both of these: depicting extreme weather is risky, because no single weather event can ever be con­clus­ively attrib­uted to cli­mate change. And renew­able energy, although a pos­itive icon for many in the envir­on­mental move­ment (and per­ceived pos­it­ively at a gen­eral level), causes con­tro­versy wherever spe­cific sit­ings of renew­able tech­no­lo­gies are pro­posed. People like the idea of wind tur­bines, but many people do not want them near their homes or in pre­vi­ously unspoilt areas. The safest options are those that con­nect on a per­sonal level with the audi­ence and demon­strate pos­itive mit­ig­a­tion or adapt­a­tion actions rather than emphas­ising the poten­tial impacts.

In a recent paper in a spe­cial issue of the journal Climatic Change, John Sterman (Sterman, 2011) argued that effect­ively com­mu­nic­ating cli­mate change requires dif­ferent modes of com­mu­nic­a­tion, including ‘exper­i­en­tial’ learning envir­on­ments such as inter­active sim­u­la­tions where people can ‘see’ for them­selves what hap­pens when (for example) levels of carbon dioxide increase in the atmo­sphere. Sterman argued that without this kind of inter­active learning about cli­mate sci­ence – let­ting ordinary people ‘exper­i­ment’ with dif­ferent aspects of the cli­mate system in sim­u­la­tions – under­standing of cli­mate change risks will never improve.