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Communicators - TOC

Climate change is arguably the biggest communication challenge -- and failure -- society has yet encountered. There is a Great Wall between the growing volume of climate-relevant information and the ability to get that information to the right people at the right time to make a difference.

That said, there is a MASSIVE amount of knowledge out there on how to best communicate climate change, including by not using the term climate change! A lot of that information is organized in the Climate Web via this Topical EntryPoint:

As part of this TOC, however, we’ve also assembled more Roadmap detail.

Entry Points into the Topic of Climate Communications in the Climate Web

Following the pattern of most topics in the Climate Web, there are a number of high-level entry-points when it comes to the overall topic of climate communications.

A Small Selection of Insightful Resources

Listed here are a sample selection of materials that let you quickly access insightful ideas and materials.

Are We Missing a Climate Narrative?

This might seem like a silly question. Aren’t there A LOT of climate narratives? In fact there are, each competing with each other for attention:

That’s arguably a real problem, in the view of oceanographer turned communicator Randy Olson. Olson has decried the lack of a cohesive climate communications narrative as one of the big reasons that we’re not successfully tackling climate change. He’s developed a whole communications methodology he calls the ABT - And, But, Therefore.

We cover Randy’s work comprehensively in the Climate Web, and let you dig deep into his work through this Insights Page:

Peter Sandman (now retired) is a communications expert, specifically in the sub-topic of risk communication. His work is extensively pulled together in the Climate Web. Through the first link below you can review our Insights page summarizing Peter’s work, and through the second link you can access his body of work represented in the Climate Web. Through the third link you can access many of Peter’s ideas pulled together in an Extracted Materials Heading.

If you’re not familiar with the relatively new fiction genre of CliFi, it’s something worth knowing more about.

One of the Mini-Courses in the Climate Web is specifically on point to climate communications, and you can access it here.

If you’re not familiar with it, the How It All Ends video series, put together with a great dose of humor by high school teacher Greg Craven, is a great introduction to all things climate change. It’s a bit dated at this point, but its initial video (the first one appearing on the list) probably remains one of the most watched climate videos of all time.

The Challenges of Climate Communication

Part of what makes tackling climate warming so hard is the existence of all kinds of barriers to effective climate communication, as suggested in the opening cartoon above.

I:CommunicationsChallenges is an Index Entry that includes a whole series of sub-Index Entries, each getting into a particular barrier relating to climate communications. See also:

N - Countering Disinformation points to the huge problem of climate disinformation.

N - Communicating Hope and Solutions gets into the need to avoid characterizing everything about climate change as a disaster.

E - Communicating Uncertainty gets into the challenge of how to communicate uncertainty, of which there is an enormous amount when it comes to climate change, without undermining the perceived urgency of the problem!

E - Evaluating Communication starts to pull together extracted materials that seek to evaluate the large topic of climate communications and its effectiveness.

Storytelling

The Words We Use

Global warming? Climate change? Climate disruption? Climate warming? What’s in a word? Quite a bit when it comes to communicating a topic like climate warming.

Changing Minds

A big part of what many people want to be able to do is to influence others. Certainly doable, but not easy!

This is a topic where Quora Q&A can be very useful:

Audience-Specific Communications

A real challenge with communicating climate warming is that there are so many different audiences, all with different agendas.

Visualizing Climate Change

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how can images and other visualizations be used to communicate climate change?

We’ve also created a series of Topical Dashboards relating to visualizing future climate change:

The How-To of Climate Communications

There is a lot of “how-to” advice out there when it comes to climate communications. You can see that just by clicking on the initial Index Entry in the list.