The range and intensity of messages about climate change we’re exposed to has perhaps never been greater. However, ‘climate communications’ are a rather more defined subset of these messages. The Yale Program on Climate Change describes them as forms of communication about climate change whose goal is “educating, informing, warning, persuading, mobilizing and solving”. The boundaries of this definition may be fuzzy, but a government advertisement encouraging people to insulate their homes would certainly be “in”, while a Donald Trump tweet would probably be “out”.
The intensifying urgency of climate action is likely to lead to demands for more communications – but is that likely to yield success? After decades of climate communications, we remain significantly short of the scale of action that’s required, and climate change seems to remain a secondary issue in politics. Climate communications have been called a ‘tragic failure’, with the blame pinned on scientists’ desire to avoid appearing emotive or politically biased.
In my eyes, this assessment is unduly harsh. Public knowledge of, and attitudes towards, climate change have radically changed since the 1970s. While many factors have contributed to this, climate communications are the primary mechanism through which we hear, see, and learn about climate change, and thus are a leading cause of change.
Defined benefits
To know whether something is successful or not, we need to know what we are trying to achieve, and what impact it’s reasonable to expect the intervention to have.
Defining ‘success’ for climate change communications is challenging. Campaigns vary in their goals, with some being mainly educational while others try to drive a particular action. It’s also important to consider the audience. Beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours towards climate change differ significantly across demographic groups, who may process a particular piece of climate communication in entirely different ways. ‘Success’ in respect of any particular individual will therefore depend on their starting point, so could range from simply imparting information, through influencing beliefs and attitudes, to motivating and mobilising behaviour change.
Where the goal is to reach and educate audiences about climate change, climate communications in the UK have been increasingly successful. A majority of people are at least aware of climate change and its anthropogenic causes, and can identify an impact or threat. As demonstrated in the government’s most recent Public Attitudes Tracker from March 2021, 51% of respondents believed that climate change is either entirely or predominantly caused by human activity – up from 38% in 2013 when the PAT first began. Furthermore, 63% of the UK public believe that climate change is already having an impact in the UK.
If the goal is to influence attitudes towards climate change, communications have also been successful. According to the PAT, 33% of the public are now ‘very concerned’ about climate change, representing nearly double the proportion in 2013. Increased debate around how we act and who is responsible, rather than whether we act and why marks significant progress.
However, providing information isn’t enough to provoke behaviour change. Research shows that audiences will only change behaviour when an awareness of the issue and incentive to act is matched with a sense of agency and practicality. While climate communications can certainly inform, pressure, and expose, our lifestyles are a result of complex supply networks, infrastructures, pricing mechanisms, and vested interests – all of which reach far beyond the influence of traditional communication campaigns. With this in mind, is it unrealistic to expect that climate communications can achieve wholesale behavioural change?
Climate change is widely recognised as what academia would define as a ‘wicked problem’. First coined by American Professors Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber in 1973, the term refers to a problem that is difficult or even impossible to solve due to its complex and interconnected nature, innumerable causes, and lack of a clear solution.
Professor Daniel Gilbert’s PAIN theory helps explain why these ‘wicked’ characteristics make it so difficult for communicators to cultivate behaviour change. Gilbert proposes that humans respond most strongly to threats which are Personal, Abrupt, Immoral, and happening Now, all of which make the ‘PAIN’ unavoidable. Until now, climate change has struggled to fulfil any of these four key triggers for action. Primarily, this is due to its consequences being multifaceted, distant in time and space, and for many, detached from what they most care about – jobs, livelihood, and family. Hence, motivating an audience to act differently in their short-term choices has been a real challenge – especially in the absence of individual urgency or incentive.
Climate change is made more ‘wicked’ because of the lack of a clear-cut action to solve it. People need to take multiple actions, making it difficult to focus on a memorable ‘quick-fix’. The recommended actions can also change over time, or from place to place, and actions that have climate change benefits can have other environmental and social downsides.
Take the case of vehicles, for example. In the early 2000s, the road tax system in the UK encouraged people to switch from petrol to diesel because it reduced CO2 emissions – but this ended up contributing to air quality problems in cities. More recently, the use of electric vehicles has been subject to scrutiny over its environmental footprint and ethical concerns. Moreover, in parts of the world where electricity is generated primarily from fossil fuels, electrification of vehicles will be less beneficial.
These complexities make it difficult to empower people to make major changes. This can either produce a ‘dipping toe’ approach to low-carbon lifestyles, or deter people from climate action altogether. In this context, it is perhaps surprising that only 52% of respondents to the PAT stated they feel there is so much conflicting information about climate change it is difficult to know what actions to take.
The absence of a generic incentive and action is exacerbated by the political context. Climate science and pro-environmental behaviours have become ideologically charged, with a refusal to make major changes becoming part of some conservative identities. This makes it harder for climate communications to be effective in influencing and mobilising behaviour change, as they must compete for attention with sceptical messages and overcome some people’s sense that acting on climate change is incompatible with their political allegiances.
Buckling down
If climate communications are to succeed in this context, it will be necessary to learn from communication campaigns that have brought about behaviour change. A good example is the THINK! campaign which, from the 1960s on, aimed to encourage UK car drivers and passengers to wear seatbelts.
Although the campaign significantly benefited from regulations that took effect in 1983, which made seat-belting mandatory for drivers and front-seat passengers, the campaign had already made notable headway through communications. By 1982, 40% of car drivers and front-seat passengers were wearing seatbelts.
The campaign made the desired behaviour feel actionable and habitual, using memorable reminders like ‘Clunk Click’. By displaying graphic sequences of dummy passengers and drivers being thrown through the windscreen, the campaign also played upon drivers’ conscience, which proved especially effective when combined with slogans such as “You know it makes sense”. By creating a label for those who didn’t wear seatbelts as ‘the clunkers’, the campaign also capitalised upon humans’ disposition to ‘follow the herd’, which is recognised as a strong motivation for behaviours that can be made a social norm.
Belting it out of the park
The THINK campaign addressed the broad issue of road safety by providing people with a clear, actionable message, that proved effective in driving behaviour change and altering public attitudes to a point where legislation wasn’t unduly controversial.
While climate communications have made an important headway in building public awareness of climate change and the need to address it, if they are to be more effective in bringing about behaviour change, these key lessons need to be learned. Rather than focus on remote concepts like road safety or emissions reduction, the emphasis should be on specific actions, such as insulating your home or holidaying closer to home. Messages should be framed in ways that harness the power of widespread decision-making biases like social norms, identity associations, habit formation and moral conscience. They should also emphasise personal incentives which might include practicality, social status, or financial savings – and policy should be designed to facilitate this.
While it may not come naturally to those most engaged in the topic, getting the message across might ultimately require marketing climate-friendly behaviours in the same way as other products, “as a brand that can be sold.”
Featured image: Joe Brusky (CC BY-NC 2.0), via Flickr
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