A blog by our co-director, Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw, and the launch of our new guide: How to Talk about Air Quality and Environmental Health.
For most of us in New Zealand, having clean water, oceans and air is important — to protect and maintain our health and the health of the planet. When it comes to the air we breathe, most of us also feel it's especially important that all our children are breathing air that keeps them well.
However, a critical new study into the air we breathe in Aotearoa — The Health and Air Pollution in New Zealand (HAPINZ) study — into the impacts of air pollution on our communities shows us that is not the case in Aotearoa. Many New Zealanders, including our children, and notably children in lower income areas, breathe air in their home, on our streets, in schools, and during their travel journeys that is harming their health. And much of this harmful air is caused by air pollutants pumped out from the many cars and trucks we have come to rely on to move people and goods around.
Read about the health and air pollution study on the Ministry for the Environment website
The good news is that work is happening by people in government to open our streets to healthier forms of mobility and transport — like walking, bikes, public transport, and electric bikes, cargo bikes and cars. Transport policy changes towards building a system that reduces the need to drive cars and trucks in and between our cities, will reduce air pollution. However, people in government need to speed up these changes to protect more people, more quickly, and to protect the environment.
The environmental health workers that take care of us all
The HAPINZ study was led by Dr Gerda Kuschel and a team of environmental health specialists. These experts are like an environmental ground crew in our communities — we don't often see them, but they’re working hard to monitor our air and other aspects of our physical environment to ensure we’re all taken care of as we go about our lives.
The Workshop team was asked to help this crew. Our role was to help Gerda and the team:
identify how people might think about air quality and health — their mindsets
consider how these mindsets might hinder people’s understanding and support for policies that will improve air quality
identify ways that people can talk about the issues more effectively when advocating for changes that will make the biggest difference to the health of our air and all of us who breathe it.
Read what we found here in the new guide - How to Talk about Air Quality and Environmental Health
How do people's shared mindsets about air quality and environmental health get in the way of better understanding?
People tend to think about air pollution in ways that are unhelpful to their understanding of air quality issues. We call these shared mindsets, and they include the following types of thinking.
Health is determined by individual behavior and choices alone — this is called health individualism.
Health is created in hospitals and doctors’ offices, and not by upstream actions and policies.
Air pollution or other environmental health impacts are an inevitable part of progress, and something we can't do much about — this is a fatalism or naturalism mindset.
Air pollution is invisible, not harmful to most, and unnecessary to address.
Environmental health is all about dealing with contaminants, as opposed to creating good health through structures and systems.
When we’re communicating, we must not amplify these mindsets by building our stories and communications around them — for example, by telling people why these ideas are untrue, or otherwise negating them. Once you tell people not to think of an elephant, the only thing they can think of is an elephant!
Instead, we should build our stories around new, more helpful narratives, which can navigate people’s thinking away from unhelpful mindsets, and direct them towards what the evidence tells us can be done.
Three tips on how to shift people towards more helpful ways of thinking about air quality
To move people towards more helpful ways of thinking, shift to your narrative, connect with people’s ‘all of us’ values, and use better explanations.
Shift to your narrative about air quality and focus on upstream causes and solutions
A narrative is like a golden thread that is reflected across all your stories. Your narrative about air quality should focus on the systems and structures that impact the air we breathe.
If people are currently influenced by narratives that tell them that health is about individual choices or behaviour change, or they think air quality is simply a matter of dealing with contaminants, it's helpful to build a narrative that shows the systems and structures that enable more or less pollutants in the places we live, work, learn and play.
New narratives about the unseen systems and structures that shape our health could involve stories that talk about health being created ‘upstream’ from us, in the places we live, work, learn, play and travel. You could discuss the ‘environmental ground crew’ to show the human agents involved in our environmental health systems.
Another tactic you can use to help overcome fatalistic thinking is to paint a clear and concrete picture of our communities with clean air — and then show the pathways people with the power to make change need to take to achieve that. Providing these hopeful visions makes change seem possible, reasonable and the common sense thing to do.
Focus on building up the muscle of this new narrative, and not on trying to negate or disprove the unhelpful narratives.
Shift to leading with ‘all of us’ values, and avoid leading with harM
While leading with deaths and harm from poor air quality is the intuitive place to start, this approach doesn't work to shift people's mindsets or build a deeper understanding of the issues.
Leading with scary data can navigate people towards a fatalism or naturalism mindset. When we’re frightened and feel we can do nothing at the individual level about the problem, we default to fatalistic thinking and switch off.
Frame your communications with why making sure we have good quality air, water and soil is important as a public good, or is what a caring community does. You can also frame it as part of the responsibility we feel to improve things over the long term for people and the planet.
Shift from describing with facts — and shift to explaining how our air quality issues happened, what the impacts are, what the solutions are, and who can fix iT
It's tempting to lead with facts to describe the impacts of air pollution. It’s a bit like leading with deaths, harm or costs. But facts are just a character in a story — you need to consider all facts in the context of how they help you navigate people away from unhelpful thinking and towards helpful thinking.
Using facts to serve a better explanation can really help, especially when you know specific changes will make a big difference to improving air quality. Whatever story you tell about air quality, make sure that you include an explanation that reflects the more helpful narrative you use.
For example, if you want to help people understand that policies, regulations, and decisions made by policy makers affect air quality — a systems narrative — then any story you tell needs to make it clear for people how the problem started and who started it; what the impacts on people are, including those most harmed; and what the solution is and who can fix it.
Different tactics can build better explanations in our communications. These tactics include naming people in the health system with hands on the levers of change, using facts judiciously to highlight systems issues specifically, and using explanatory metaphors like upstream health and downstream impacts.