Communicating Climate Change: A New Narrative for the Future
How do you communicate something that you hardly can see because takes place mostly in hidden places or in the future, something that is often threatening; therefore many don’t want to hear it, something that promises to change everything we know? This article is about climate change communication, but it’s also about the communication strategies around sustainability: social, economic and ecological. How do we communicate the urgency of these topics, how do we build hope, how do we imagine a different future and promote actions to make it real?
This summer I was in Mongolia, standing at the bottom of a gigantic dune. Around us, only the steppe. All tourist were there for the challenge of climbing it. The dune was beautiful, with subtle pink sand, and so enormous. We were all wondering if we were going to make it. The Mongolian guides remained at the foot of the dune making fun of us, and I think also betting on who was going to make it. It was tough to climb it! Every step you take, in the steepest part, means falling three steps behind. You kind of force yourself to do like fifteen steps maximum, and then you fall half covered in the sand trying to gain your self-control and energy. Among us, the climbers, we were talking and laughing and exchanging thought. We were all focused on the challenge. None of us was actually wondering what was on the top. We never considered what we were going to see up there; we were focused on the path.
While I was thinking about my work in communicating sustainability, this story came to my mind. Climate change communication and I would say more broadly, sustainability communication is a complicated topic for various reasons, but I believe it is one of the most critical challenges we face today. I say sustainability communication because I think that in the climate change topic there is much more than climate change itself. That’s why I always prefer to refer to sustainability using the broader term that includes the social, economic and ecological systems. In the end, they are all involved in this topic, and if you try to communicate climate change, all these systems will, at some point, be touched.
Why it is so difficult
Well, there are a significant number of reasons why communicating sustainability is a tough challenge in which I believe we are many times failing.
First of all, sustainability means thinking about the world as a big system made of subsystems which are all interconnected. The social system, the economic and the ecological ones are the big systems involved, but then, inside each one of them, there are infinite numbers of sub-systems. You touch one, and you see the systems around adapting and reacting many times in unpredictable ways. And system thinking is a method to apply both while analyzing the problems and while looking for solutions. There is no solution if we are not considering the larger pictures, and this is a way of thinking that might not be so common for our brains.
I found this topic fascinating when I was reading Abundance by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. The theory of this book is that we are not doomed at all and that if we face the future in the right way and are able to use the new technologies in a way that encourage their scalability, then we can create abundance in the world without threatening the planet boundaries. I recommend the book. It talks about technologies that have been developed and might be a real solution for today’s problems and talks about how to accelerate the adoption of these technologies. The first chapter though is dedicated to the psychological barriers that prevent us to believe in a positive change for our future. And this I found interesting as a communication professional.
Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler talk about the cognitive biases and the prejudices that make us optimist on a local level and pessimist to a global one. But what I found interesting is the part about the amygdala. To make a long story short, our brains evolved in such a way that the first filter to spot dangerous situation is the amygdala. So we are looking for dangers around us, we are naturally attracted by the negative news because we need to be more careful to those because they can be detrimental for our safety. Our brain was created for a linear world where we needed to act quickly to all incitements. It’s not like this anymore. We are not living in the woods among other stronger predators anymore, and we are regularly subjected to stimuli from the outside world which is larger then ever. We cannot react in the same way to all of those. But we naturally do. The problem is that our world is not local anymore, it is global, and the result of this brain approach to danger and menaces is stressful. Therefore to protect ourselves we tend to lock outside everything that seems far away and not an immediate threat. And our empathy that is located in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain is a recent add-on in our evolution. This means that this area reacts too late and slowly. So the first reaction to the bad news about climate change and sustainability problems are taking place in the amygdala. So denial and fear come in, not empathy. This is the first problem then. Our brains automatically react in the wrong way because they are not programmed for a global world where we need to feel empathy to take action for problems that might not be involving directly us but also other humans.
Besides this linear brain problem, we are also deeply attached to our biases which are kind of “quick ways through” for the brain to eliminate complexity and make decisions faster when we are facing dangerous or unknown situations. Because of these biases we give higher value to negative news and experiences, we remain too attached to one single information when we are deciding instead of considering all of the information, we believe things because the majority around us do so and so on...
Both these mechanism of our brains are working against long-term solutions to the sustainable life of humans on this planet and are often preventing us from seeing the bigger picture and more innovative solutions for the future.
Then there is another topic connected to this. Even if changes are taking place and there are improvements, it’s not easy to measure change and impacts because they are slow and often taking place in the suburbs of our societies and not at the center.
This reminds me of Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit. In the book many times she says: “It’s always too soon to go home. And it’s always too soon to calculate effects”. She refers to the fact that movement and activism often don’t get to see immediate results and have to wait sometimes even decades. She also says that “we adjust to change without measuring them, we forget how much the culture changed.” And it’s true. Many things have improved in our lives, but we are hardly keeping them in consideration. Another great scholar, Hans Rosling did a fantastic TED conference visualizing the vast improvements our society had made on many topics. It was an eye-opener at that time, both for the information it was giving and for the way to visualize data in a way that transform them into a story.
And then we get to what I was talking about at the beginning of the article, and to the end of my story in Mongolia.
Well, in the end, that day in Mongolia some of us made it to the top of the dune, but some didn’t. I was among those who failed. No big deal. The landscape, while we were climbing, was terrific. The sunset was transforming the dune into a fire and the steppe around into a sea of pink sand far until I could see. At one point I thought, well, better to stop here, enjoy this beautiful moment and then go down. And that I did. No regret until I was talking at night with one of the tourists climbing with us and he showed me a video he did of the landscape from the top of the dune, and that was the moment.
Watching the video I realized that I was so focused on the challenge of getting to the top, which in the end was just a challenge like many others, and I was missing the reason why, the core of that effort, the pure beauty that was waiting for me up there. It was spectacular, and I could not have imagined such a beauty. The landscape on the other side was entirely different. It was kind of a vast sea of dunes, bathing in the sunset light and with a blue sky disappearing. Amazing. But nobody had told me about that beauty that was waiting for me on the top of the climbing. I wasn’t visualizing the real core of the challenge which was not the climbing itself but the arrival.
“They should have sent a poet”. Jodie Foster in Contact while contemplating the space and the planets around her.
So, one thing I believe we can integrate into the communication around climate change and sustainability is the narrative around the future we foresee once we win. How does it look like the world once we have won the challenge of changing things and once we have restored the balance between our world and planet Earth. This image should be the core of our communication.
But what if we see that future world and it is actually the end of the world, and we are running out of time, and there is no hope. For many, it is so. And if you think this, well, you are not alone at all. A recent study by GlobeScan among sustainability experts revealed that hope to revert and stop climate change is not so popular nowadays.
So, are we doomed? It is a possibility, but Earth and humanity have survived to too many horrible things, and humans have adapted before often finding solidarity and new strength in the worse conditions.
I understand the need to describe the horrible future that might come if we don’t act now. It is also a communication trick to make people visualize the “what if” option. But it is also hazardous. If everything is doomed than why act? Why do anything if there is no future and no possibility to change and revert climate change?
But there are people envisioning another different future, and they also have some convincing scientific proofs. One of these movements is the Drawdown project.
This project — also a book — is starting from 100 of the most substantive solutions to reverse global warming. The terms “drawdown” refers to the idea of drawing down carbon, so all the projects analyzed in the book are “carbor suckers” that reduce emissions or sequester carbon from the atmosphere. The idea is that if these technological solutions are scaled, their impact could be massive and could indeed revert global warming.
Diamandis and Kotler share this idea in the book Abundance where they tell the example of mobile phones as a technology that expanded in the developing countries at a rate that was not foreseen at all and that even made them skip the old technology. In fact, the landlines for phones were not built at all, and they directly jumped to the mobile system which is today spreading amazing applications, services, and possibilities to areas where it was really difficult to get before. So if the 100 solutions of the Drawdown project could scale like the mobile technology, a profound and positive impact might take place.
But to implement all these and support the changes needed in society and economics, we first need hope. In the end, again Rebecca Solnit tells it in a nut: “hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency…Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope”.
But hope is difficult to grow. Again, Solnit mentions this lines by Czech statesman Vaclav Havel: “Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it’s a dimension of the soul…It’s an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond horizons…an ability to work for something because it’s good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”
So how do we plant the seeds of hope in a heart that is dry and frightened or indifferent?
How do we overcome the obstacles and seeds hope
Well, the answer is one, but it’s also made of many aspects. Stories are vital to overcoming nearly all of the obstacles we talked about, stories and imagination. Why?
Because stories are a big simulation park. We hear a story that mentions a perfume and the part of our brain dedicated to smells activates as if it was real. We describe a landscape, and the visual section of the brain animates as if we see it. We tell a story about the Tour Eiffel, and the eyes of the listeners move vertically as if to capture the high of the monument. This is a fantastic power that allows us to make people visualize what is not yet there. So what better tool than stories and the power of imagination to narrate the future that we want to build?
“This is another lesson from the transformative movements of the past: all of them understood that the process of shifting cultural values — though somewhat ephemeral and difficult to quantify — was central to their work. And so they dreamed in public, showed humanity a better version of itself, modeled different values in their behavior, and in the process liberated the political imagination and rapidly altered the sense of what was possible.”
Moreover, stories push us towards action as does hope. We see it in the big fan communities following TV shows or around the world among activists of social movements (Black lives matter, Occupy, Arab Springs). The responses are amazing. Not only people are there for themselves and what they love and belive, but they are there because they enjoy the sense of being a community and sharing an identity with many other people. These people are always connected by shared stories that become their glue and act as a springboard for action. And the good news is that today stories drive faster than ever thanks to technology and social media.
Stories are also the best tool because they speak to the part of the brain where decisions are made. Then the analytical brain comes in, but the emotional part has already decided. If a story sticks with us, we will be very excited and willing to know more or to know what we can do to be involved in it and to be part of it.
The only problem is that also stories, as they have been with us for centuries and have developed with our culture, are often very linear and very inspired by the hero journey: one single hero facing his challenge will overcome it through a series of attempts until the end. And this often makes us looking for a hero to guide us. But there might be no hero in this challenge. No single hero might solve such a systemic challenge. So the new stories that we need to build a more sustainable future should instead be more focused on the collective power. There will be no hero saving us, but it will be a system of communities that will probably come in and save the world. So, once again let me quote Rebecca Solnit when talking about the collective efforts to cultivate hope and change things she writes: “If you’re lucky, you carry a torch into the dark of Virginia Woolf’s, and if you’re really lucky you’ll sometimes see to whom you’ve passed it, as I did on that day (and if you’re polite, you will remember who handed it to you).” And this is the kind of collective narrative I believe we need to share and build to change things.
Naomi Klein in This changes everything says that one day she was thinking about the questions to make to Syriza leader, Alexis Tsipras, and somebody suggested her a brilliant one: “History is knocking on your door, will you answer?”. For this article I would adjust it to: History is knocking on your door, will you be able to communicate the future you want to see in order to spread action?. I always try to keep this in mind in my work and personal life and I’m always wandering and studying the most effective ways. It’s a threatening challenge, but if you know the beauty that lies on the top of this dune that we need to climb, the challenge seems exciting and entirely possible to achieve.
Samara Croci
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