Climate change affects all, directly or indirectly. For the last half a decade, public communication about it has been framed in terms of “crisis,” “emergency,” and served the need to bring attention to the unfolding global disaster. Yet this type of anxiety-inducing discourse may not be helpful in the long run. The media needs to know how to keep audiences engaged with the story – and motivated to act upon it. The new monograph Effective Climate Communication: Turning Eco-Anxiety into Eco-Empowerment looks at the pragmatic ways to formulate climate communication for a problem that is here to stay.
1. Highlight Actionable Solutions
If you were deadly afraid of snakes, would it make you feel better if you saw someone holding one in their arms? Probably. But what if I asked you to hold the reptile yourself, if it were in a safe environment and with the professional available to protect you? According to a well-known experiment by the Canadian-American psychologist Albert Bandura, both approaches to snake phobia are useful to build the sense of self-efficacy, or the belief in one’s own capacity to organise and execute actions in a particular situation. To build a sense of efficacy, holding the snake yourself is even better than observing someone else do it.
Applying this approach to climate change means providing the audience with the action points or stories that explain what is being done or can be done to curb or mitigate climate change. The action points can be individual or collective – the important thing is to offer the implementable, actionable ideas to the audience.
Living in an age of multiple crises (or “present shock” as coined by media thinker Douglas Rushkoff), means being exposed to too many notifications and news headlines, many of them negative and overwhelming. Climate change discourse tends to be dominated by the frames of catastrophe, crisis, disaster. Even as these frames are rightfully true of many climate-related events, they can remove the audience’s sense of agency. Offering solution-oriented storytelling can empower people to make sustainable choices in their daily lives, voting decisions, and point to the intervention points at community and national levels.
Unlike “problem journalism,” solutions journalism aims to provide not only a factual description of the problem, but include thoroughly-researched possible solutions. Similarly, constructive journalism presents to the audience the developments that are positive and progressive, thus addressing the negativity bias inherent in traditional news.
While research on constructive and solutions journalism reveals that they may still instill a sense of worry as they describe problems, their net benefit shows that they are worth exploring as empowering modes of climate reporting.
2. Connect Global Crises to Local Stories
Climate coverage often suffers from what I call delocalisation. There is a gap between reporting on immediate disasters and the high-level global climate change agenda, which prevents audiences from engaging with a clear understanding of the issue or better preparing for its effects within their own communities.
Continue reading on MediaWell…
Photo by Mark König on Unsplash
