How to Talk About Climate Change that Will Inspire Group Action

Climate change has global impacts and consequences that could span many generations. The COVID-19 pandemic we are experiencing has some similarities with climate change.

Both impacts are global in scale and have claimed thousands of lives. The only difference is that COVID-19 is temporary, but climate change will be with us long-term.

Communities and countries with weak adaptive capacity are particularly vulnerable to climate change. These populations live in poor and developing countries and are located in coastal, low-lying, and urban areas with dense populations.

The consequences of climate change will only exacerbate the already challenging situations these people live in unless climate adaptation or mitigation measures are done.

With the seriousness of climate change impact, the question remains – how can it be effectively communicated that would lead and inspire positive action, and who should it be communicated to?

Researchers have put together the short guide “How to Talk About Climate Change.” It offers a framework for constructing communication strategies. The framework serves as a guide to communicating research and science to inspire action concerning the big issue of climate change. It can also be used as a basis for discussing findings on climate action.

To apply the framework, the communicator would need to identify the following:

• Who are the characters in your story? It could be your reader, writer, politician, fossil fuel executive or even a system. These are the people you would want to inform or want to elicit climate actions.
• What is your vision, or what do you want them to do? You need to be specific and provide facts and figures.
• Why does your message or story matter? What shared values would you like to draw from your audience to make them work together?
• Specify the barriers to achieving the vision. This can be done by attributing cause and effect based on evidence with the agent’s name. There may be multiple causes, barriers, and effects, so try to keep it simple.
• Provide solutions by citing better outcomes based on evidence. For example, we can limit global warming by limiting the amounts of rampant carbon we emit in the atmosphere or by accelerating ongoing efforts to achieve a 100% renewable energy system.

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