Kia ora from Jess,
This week the messages between me and close friends caught up in the cyclone in Auckland and Hawkes Bay have mainly been focussed on sending love and support as they grapple with the immediate shock and overwhelm of the cyclone. For one friend trying to get their elderly grandmother out of the floods and to a place with power and food and stability has been hugely difficult. And while I think about what I can (or in this case can’t) do right now for them, I am also constantly thinking about what we must do next for all of us.
Many of us know that we can still prevent climate induced weather events like this - we can stop them getting worse and more frequent. We also know that we can do effective work to ensure when these events do happen we withstand them better. We see just how much sense there is in allocating more resources now, to prevent worse outcomes later, and protect the people and places we love better than we have.
However, while we know these things, what we feel is something different. We often feel fatalistic and hopeless. That is often because people in politics have not acted, despite the clear evidence and need, even with the water washing over their feet. It is simply another data point that feels like it is being ignored. Even now our new PM Chris Hipkins talks about climate change as almost an afterthought, like he thinks it is a bit “too political”to talk about. It is kind of enraging.
Bernard Hickey captures this shared frustration about the lack of action and common sense, and the sense of fatalism that many people feel as a result, in his recent piece reproduced on The Spinoff.
Hickey ended his piece by sharing the International Monetary Fund’s recommendations on how to how to improve the effectiveness of climate policies, which included:
educate the public about the causes and consequences of climate change and the costs of inaction
talk about the costs of inaction, such as pollution, and the benefits of addressing these, like improvements for air quality, health, and protection of low-income households
emphasise that the policies work, so the trade-offs are worth it
underscore the shared spirit of solidarity and need for strong climate policies in a broad range of economies.
And he concludes that “In our context, this would mean prime ministers, mayors and other party leaders arguing in favour of policies that reduce emissions, using political and physical capital to subsidise climate actions, and pointing out the other health and social benefits of a just transition. Here’s hoping for a bit more acting and a lot less performing.”
So how do we get those people in politics acting at the right scale and with the urgency we need?
Should we keep giving them the facts and cost effectiveness data over and over, pointing to the water flooding our homes and substations and ruining our infrastructure, killing our people? Engaging in direct advocacy? Writing frustrated op-eds? Yes, not least because we are sad, angry, grief stricken and scared. It's important to do something using the tools available to us. And there are some other change strategies and tools we need to get familiar with in order to have the impact we want on people who have the power to allocate the resources we need at the scale we need.
These strategies and tools derive from understanding first how people in politics (and other decision making positions) decide to act.
Activating the public to activate the politicians – the science of public mindset shift
People in politics, people at the head of the public service departments who approve policies, people who lead businesses, and other organisations - these are the people with the power to allocate the resources we need over the time frame we need. We could describe these people as being like a balloon tied to a rock. That rock being their constituents, the people who they believe they represent, the people who they hear from most, and from whom they need to hear their support for specific actions. When the rock shifts, so does the balloon.
So where is that rock on climate change right now and how far does it need to shift? Well as Hickey also points out, that rock (the public) doesn't have a deep understanding on what climate change is about, what causes it and what the most effective actions are. In other words our shared mindsets (mental models, understandings) about climate change and what works are too shallow and need shifting. The people in politics are going to shift also.
One reason for this has been the capture of our information environment by those who don't want us to redesign systems like transport, trade, building, that rely on fossil fuels. Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes discovered that the fossil fuel industry has worked for decades to shape the public discourse and with it the public mindset about climate change.
First, people working in the fossil fuel industry used story after story, creating a strong core narrative, to tell us it wasn’t happening. Then they moved on to ensure that people thought that it was really only individual consumer action that was needed to address it. Not a redesign of our transport, economy, and other systems underpinned by the fossil fuels they make squillons from. The focus on reducing your personal carbon footprint is a fossil fuel industry communications success story.
It's no wonder people are lost about what to do, and think recycling is the shift that will make the biggest difference. When in reality the initiatives and changes involve significant shifts across every aspect of how we build, work, travel, trade, learn, play.
The rock needs to shift to shift the balloon. We need engaged and activated citizens across all spheres of our communities demanding their decision makers redesign our carbon reliant systems.
Education matters, and it has to include activating people as citizens
It is critical that people understand the issues more deeply. We do need a public who is educated about the causes and consequences of climate change. Yet filling people up with good facts and information won’t shift public mindsets or engage them as activated citizens.
You can give people great facts about climate change, remind them of the impacts of too much water, point to the need for carbon reducing strategies, and we must. But simply providing people with more and more data points for existing understandings (helpful or unhelpful) isn’t enough. It does not shift mindsets or lead to people acting in the most impactful ways if they don't already know. Especially in an information environment being actively manipulated to ensure people don’t understand and act in the most effective ways.
What increases the impact of any climate education approaches is taking an evidence based approach to shifting public mindsets and narratives. Such an approach needs us to understand:
how significant social and structural change happens - notably the role of public support to shift decision makers
the existing public mindsets that may stop people from understanding and supporting such change, and those that encourage it
the narratives that bring to the surface the different mindsets
the narrative and linguistic tools and techniques that work best to shift narratives and mindsets that are too shallow and are preventing people from acting.
With these pieces of the puzzle in place we can activate people in the public to ask decision makers to do the right type of work – shift the rock to shift the balloon.
Depoliticising climate communications so people in politics and the public service have the confidence to talk about it (and do some of the education work also)
I'm also interested in how we “depoliticise” communications about climate so both decision makers and the public service can also do more of the communications leadership we need. By depoliticising I don't mean “just the facts mam”.
I mean showing people that the planet's health and climate change is a shared human concern and acting on it is sensible, needed, and has shared benefits, no matter what political group we might identify with. I think we need this so that the people in public service can feel more confidence to do their jobs on climate change.
That people in the public service (and in politics to some extent) are so reluctant to talk about the climate mitigation and adaptation actions that will make the biggest difference in compelling and confident ways is evidence of the effectiveness of the strategy to politicise reliable information, including climate science and action, which makes many people withdraw from engaging with it.
By making effective climate action “party political”, those who undermined the idea of science and reliable information, have successfully prevented our public services from talking about what works. It is risky to be called out for “politicising policy” when you are supposed to be neutral. In the case of people in politics it is perceived to turn off your main voting constituents. So what we have been left with is a lot of “safe” talk about individual consumer behaviour change. It's easy and politically low risk to tell people to buy their way or choose their way out of climate change, even while it is essentially the least impactful thing we can do because climate change needs a redesign of systems and structures. But consumer focussed individual level intervention doesn't require anyone with power changing anything. And is deeply annoying for people in the public who are often constrained by the realities of things like resources, time and energy.
What people in the public service need are effective ways to talk about climate change that connect with the majority of people and remind them that this matters to the life they value, the world they want to live in, regardless of who they are or who they vote for.
Three things to know - related to communications - that lead to action
Understand you need public mindsets and narratives that help people to understand the problem and solutions, as a necessary condition to lead decision makers to act
Know the different public mindsets on climate (they are not monolithic, there are many) - and what narratives will work to bring to the surface helpful ones.
We are all communicators. So no matter what your role, familiarise yourself with communication strategies, techniques and tools that connect with shared helpful mindset and narratives. These will open a door for many people to feel a connection to the issues, understand the power they do have to act as citizens, and know what they can do.
Together we can shift the rock of public understanding and support, leading decision makers to act to protect the people and places we love.
Jess
Learn how to shift public mindsets on climate change. Visit our training page for more information.