Tag Archives: environment

The Messaging of Climate Change

86% of the world believes that climate change is a real thing. That’s the finding of a massive new mega study with hundreds of authors (the paper’s author acknowledgement is a page and a half). 60,000 participants from 63 countries around the world took part. And, as I said, 86% of them believe in climate change.

Frankly, there’s no surprise there. You just have to look out your window to see it. Here in my corner of the world, wildfires wiped out hundreds of homes last summer and just a few weeks ago, a weird winter whiplash took temperatures from unseasonably warm to deep freeze cold literally overnight. This anomaly wiped out this region’s wine industry. The only thing surprising I find about the 86 percent stat is that 14% still don’t believe. That speaks of a determined type of ignorance.

What is interesting about this study is that it was conducted by behavioral scientists. This is an area that has always fascinated me. From the time I read Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book, Nudge, I have always been interested in behavioral interventions. What are the most effective “nudges” in getting people to shift their behaviors to more socially acceptable directions?

According to this study, that may not be that easy. When I first dove into this study, my intention was to look at how different messages had different impacts depending on the audience: right wing vs left wing for instance. But in going through the results, what struck me the most was just how poorly all the suggested interventions performed. It didn’t matter if you were liberal or conservative or lived in Italy or Iceland. More often than not, all the messaging fell on deaf ears.

What the study did find is that how you craft your campaign about climate change depends on what you want people to do. Do you want to shift non-believers in Climate Change towards being believers? Then decrease the psychological distance. More simply put, bring the dangers of climate change to their front doorstep. If you live next to a lot of trees, talk about wildfires. If you live on the coast, talk about flooding. If you live in a rural area, talk about the impacts of drought. But it should be noted that we weren’t talking a massive shift here – with an “absolute effect size of 2.3%”. It was the winner by the sheer virtue of sucking the least.

If you want to build support for legislation that mitigates climate change, the best intervention was to encourage people to write a letter to a child that’s close to you, with the intention that they read it in the future. This forces the writer to put some psychological skin in the game.  

Who could write a future letter to someone you care about without making some kind of pledge to make sure there’s still a world they can live in? And once you do that, you feel obligated to follow through. Once again, this had a minimal impact on behaviors, with an overall effect size of 2.6%.

A year and a half ago, I talked about Climate Change messaging, debating Mediapost Editor-in-Chief Joe Mandese about whether a doom and gloom approach would move the needle on behaviors. In a commentary from the summer of 2022, Mandese wrapped up by saying, “What the ad industry really needs to do is organize a massive global campaign to change the way people think, feel and behave about the climate — moving from a not-so-alarmist “change” to an “our house is on fire” crisis.”

In a follow up, I worried that doom and gloom might backfire on us, “Cranking up the crisis intensity on our messaging might have the opposite effect. It may paralyze us.”

So, what does this study say?

The answer, again, is, “it depends.” If we’re talking about getting people to share posts on social media, then Doom and Gloom is the way to go. Of all the various messaging options, this had the biggest impact on sharing, by a notable margin.

This isn’t really surprising. A number of studies have shown that negative news is more likely to be shared on social media than positive news.

But what if we’re asking people to make a change that requires some effort beyond clicking the “share” button? What if they actually have to do something? Then, as I suspected, Doom and Gloom messaging had the opposite effect, decreasing the likelihood that people would make a behavioral change to address climate change (the study used a tree planting initiative as an example). In fact, when asking participants to actually change their behavior in an effortful way, all the tested climate interventions either had no effect or, worse, they “depress(ed) and demoralize(d) the public into inaction”.

That’s not good news. It seems that no matter what the message is, or who the messenger is, we’re likely to shoot them if they’re asking us to do anything beyond bury our head in the sand.

What’s even worse, we may be losing ground. A study from 10 years ago by Yale University had more encouraging results. They showed that effective climate change messaging, was able to shift public perceptions by up to 19 percent. While not nearly as detailed as this study, the results seem to indicate a backslide in the effectiveness of climate messaging.

One of the commentators that covered the new worldwide study perhaps summed it up best by saying, “if we’re dealing with what is probably the biggest crisis ever in the history of humanity, it would help if we actually could talk about it.”

Wishful Thinking for 2024

I write this on the first day of 2024. My 2023 went out last night with a whimper. That was intentional. Given the global trauma inflicted on us over the past few years, I felt a muted goodbye was best. And I’d be lying if I said I was looking forward to 2024. I am approaching it with the same enthusiasm as a minefield I have to tiptoe to the other side of.

I never really got celebrating New Year’s. It is literally just another day. In my childhood, many eons ago, New Year’s Eve was significant only because it was the one day a year when we were able to get both potato chips and dip.  If I remember rightly French Onion was our dip of choice. And I got to stay up late. The glow of that perk had dimmed dramatically over the years.

I suppose New Year’s gives us a chance for a global reset, to put the past year behind us and promise to do better in the coming year. It’s like that moment right after you have sorted out your sock drawer, writ large. You go forward swearing that only matched and bundled socks will go there from this point forward. Of course, it’s probably only a matter of days before that first stray Nike athletic sock finds its way there and the portal to the alternative universe of mismatched socks is prised open, allowing them to proliferate in your drawer without restraint.

But still, a fellow can dream, can’t he?

So, in that spirit, I do have a few things I hope take place in 2024. They are not resolutions – more like wishful thoughts.

Less Toxic Social Media

Given that 2024 is a US election year and is promises to be the most bizarre one yet, I hope that social media starts to move away from the cesspool of misinformation it currently is. Digital Anthropologist Giles Crouch (a job title I wish I had pursued 30 years ago) thinks “the invisible hand” (subscription required) will start to move on social media. Recent lawsuits and more restrictive legislation are already impacting the profitability of the main platforms.

But more than that, usage is changing. People under 30 are using social media as a connector less and less, preferring to meet face to face IRL (in Real Life). And the toxic audience (yes, I’m talking about my generation) that made Facebook and X (the former Twitter) such a threat to democracy is aging out. Hopefully new social media players that fill this emerging gap will learn from past mistakes.

World Governments Getting Serious about Climate Change

I hope that 2023 will prove to be the tipping point for dealing with Climate Change, moving it from a right vs left campaign talking point to something that we actually start doing something about.  Here in Canada, I’ve seen a few promising signs. Our federal government has a nasty habit of setting climate targets and then completely ignoring them. The website Climateactiontracker lists our targets as “Almost Sufficient” but our overall action as “Highly Insufficient” (putting us behind the US, which is rated as “Insufficient”).

But after last summer, when much of our country was on fire, I think we might finally be getting some legislation with some teeth in it.  Canada just unveiled plans to phase out sales of gas-powered cars by 2035. We just have to make our government stick to that plan.

Make Conscientious Capitalism a Real Thing

My final hope is that this year, we start to find a way to make free markets, consumerism and capitalism work for a sustainable society rather than against it. History has proven that there is no more efficient engine for innovation than capitalism, but it has also shown that economist Milton Friedman was right: the only thing corporations care about (or should care about) is maximizing profit.

Maybe this year, we can find a way to make good behavior more profitable. And that puts the onus on us, the market. We have to make our purchase decisions with our future in mind. Ultimately, that future will follow the money and for that reason, the buck always stops with us. In a capitalist society, no one is more powerful than the consumer. We have to wield that power wisely.

It’s 2024. Good luck. I think we’ll need it.

(Image – Laura Billings – Creative Commons License)