20.2.1 Changing Narrative Approach

Telling a story is a more complex process than simply commenting on climate change in the media. Still, the most obvious and immediate means of communicating climate change (and generally science), and of reaching the public, is via media coverage. The approach to communicating climate change in media has been evolving, gradually shifting the focus from reporting facts to emotions, from global and distant issues to local problems, from general to personal concerns, and from apocalyptic visions to resilience-focused messages.

For many decades, a popular approach to science communication has been the information deficit model, which ‘assumes that gaps between scientists and the public are a result of a lack of information or knowledge’.Footnote ²⁸ It is a relatively simple model, but does reflect the way researchers often think about the production of knowledge. According to this approach, it seems sufficient to provide the public with relevant information to impact their attitudes and behaviours. In his 2011 work Who Speaks for the Climate? Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change, Maxwell Boykoff emphasises that such an approach presumes that ‘audiences are ignorant and need to be ‘supplied’ with good, factual information’.Footnote ²⁹ The deficit model has been widely criticised – importantly for ‘inaccurately characterising the relationship between knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours’,Footnote ³⁰ and has been debunked by scientists themselves. Yet, it is still used in various kinds of communication and governs what and how we learn from mainstream media, social media, websites, reports, films, and books.Footnote ³¹

While reporting facts to fill in gaps in our knowledge is still practised by scientists, media commentators, advisors, or policy makers, it has been widely recognised that contextualised and personalised communication will more easily grab attention and trigger emotions. Hence, personal and emotional connections are being made with increasing frequency in media coverage on climate change. We could see this clearly, for example, in the coverage of the bushfires that engulfed much of Australia across the summer of 2019–2020. In addition to learning about extreme weather patterns, temperature records, and drier climate, we predominantly heard the stories directly from those who endured the fires, about loss and personal tragedy, as well as resilience, courage, and kindness. While we were advised by the experts that it is ‘very difficult in general to attribute climate change impacts to a specific event’ (Richard Thornton) and that ‘[i]t’s not every weather event that is the direct result of climate change’ (Glenda Wardle),Footnote ³² it was clear that whatever was happening resulted in loss, grief, and, hopefully, recovery that would follow. It was the lived experience of individuals that gained prominence in Australian media and beyond.

The article published in The Guardian by Graham Readfearn and his team, ‘Inside Australia’s climate emergency: the new fire zone’, is one of the examples of such an approach.Footnote ³³ It does not overload readers with scientific facts, but rather weaves the text about human-caused – as it was stressed – climate change and high-risk bushfire weather, together with short videos of a father and daughter taking readers through the surroundings of their burnt family property and telling about ‘memory in the place’.Footnote ³⁴ The readers can read the text in between the videos or have it imposed onto the recorded scenes. The format of the story with all its sensory elements, visuals and sounds, including the victims’ voices, facilitates emotional reception of the story and supports empathetic connection that develops throughout the reportage. At the end, readers are likely to find themselves nodding to the father’s words: ‘I’m calling it a climate change fire – some of the firemen might disagree but, to me, that’s what caused this fire.’ A certain degree of interactivity allowed by the format of the reportage – that is, navigable textual sections, which are less personal and more factual, together with video and audio – conveying very personal experience of two individuals, gives a sense of immersion (even if minimal) and of agency. While we cannot change the story, we have some choice as to how we will engage with it, what elements of it we will allow to impact our interpretation, and how we will imagine its broader context.

It is also the lived experience of cultures that has become more visible and important in media coverage of recent climate change events. Another interactive article in the same series of The Guardian, ‘The frontline Inside Australia’s climate emergency: the killer heat’ (2021) by reporters Helen Davidson, Adam Morton, and Lauren Molan, informs its audience that Australia is heating faster than the global average.Footnote ³⁵ The climate change facts are provided within the context of a story from the siblings from Tennant Creek located on Warumungu land, one of the hottest regions of Australia, telling about extreme heat affecting lives of Wupurarni people and breaking ‘a connection with the land that stretches back millennia’. The relevance of this personalised communal experience is particularly important as the severity of climate change consequences remains under-recognised not only by policymakers but also by the wider community that is living through these changes.Footnote ³⁶

So, there has been a clear shift from reporting facts (following the deficit model) to reporting the lived experiences of individuals and cultures. This shift is based on the recognition that relatable and personalised stories of ordinary people and communities more directly and effectively communicate the urgency and consequences of climate change. They are more likely to capture the imagination, build connections, foster empathy and have a lasting impact. And yet, stories about the experiences of ordinary people, which are relatable and personal, rather than abstract and distant, are still to a large extent missing from climate change communication.Footnote ³⁷

One of the reasons is the reluctance to recognise emotions as reliable and informative. However, Sabine Roeser, in her article ‘Risk communication, public engagement, and climate change: a role for emotions risk communication’, suggests that ‘Emotions might be the missing link in effective communication about climate change in a two-fold way: they lead us to more awareness of the problems and to being motivated to do something about climate change.’Footnote ³⁸ She refers to Elke Weber’s argument that ‘risk communication strategies should explicitly appeal to emotions’ and to the reasoning of Meijnders et al.,Footnote ³⁹ who argue that ‘communication about climate change should appeal more directly to feelings such as fear’. Roeser supports her claims with philosophical theories and trans-disciplinary research to suggest that emotions are important determinants in risk perception, make things relatable, enable our moral and practical judgments, stimulate reflection, and support critical decision-making.Footnote ⁴⁰ They are essential for effective communication and motivation to act, and thus, according to Roeser, for integrating emotions into the debate about climate change:

Of course, there is more to it – emotions differ, and are not always positive. They include feelings of justice, sympathy for victims, care, worry, but also fear, distress or anxiety. Moreover, emotional responses may lead to ethical problems, such as manipulation,Footnote ⁴² or errors in risk perception.Footnote ⁴³ Roeser suggests that emotions trigger critical reflection that should not be underestimated, and thus appealing to moral emotions about climate change can enable more thorough ethical reflection, provided these appeals are not ‘limited to alarmist images’ but also offer ‘narratives and portraits of people who undergo the effects of climate change’.Footnote ⁴⁴

What this research points to is that to be more effective, communication about climate change should appeal to emotions and feelings to entice moral reflection and motivation.Footnote ⁴⁵ It should also convey emotions and the ethical concerns of experts and scientists themselves.Footnote ⁴⁶ But perhaps the role of emotions in climate change communication should be understood from a broader perspective. In order to understand what advice should be offered to scientists on how to tell the story of climate change, Dylan Harris conducted semi-structured interviews with self-identified climate storytellers in Appalachia and Alaska.Footnote ⁴⁷ According to the interviewees, what matters to them is ‘context and connection’. In other words, abstract and universal concepts should be communicated in a way that connects with people and specific, contextualised (personal and collective) experiences.Footnote ⁴⁸

Harris’ research focuses on a small group of storytellers working with specific communities. Yet, understanding contextualised experiences is essential also when communicating to a broader audience.Footnote ⁴⁹ This implies knowing audiences and their different ways of responding to climate change, as Leiserowitz argues in his research Global Warming’s Six Americas.Footnote ⁵⁰ But this also requires scholars, educators, and communicators to make the effort to better understand communities and cultures, specific local concerns and anxieties, reaching beyond strict climate science and becoming better ‘listeners’ – after all ‘storytelling is a conversation’.Footnote ⁵¹

The focus on the contextualised and personal does not need to divert from universal truths, just like emotions do not have to be inferior to reason and analytical procedures. The outcomes of Harris’ interviews with self-identified storytellers from the Appalachia and Alaska regions suggest that what holds ‘the contextual and the universal in is some degree of abstraction which is a useful element of climate change communication’ and ‘abstraction gives ability to tie universal issues with specific context, encourages analysis and creative interpretation’.Footnote ⁵² The Guardian series ‘Inside Australia’s climate emergency’ shows this approach well both by tying abstract facts to place-based experiences, and by drawing on ideas that are emotional and reinforce particular feelings.

Storytellers interviewed by Harris also argued that, in telling climate stories, some degree of ambiguity is quite useful. It helps to engage the audience, but most importantly it gives the audience agency and allows them to interpret the information themselves. Contrary to what might be expected from climate change communication, some interpretative freedom does not necessarily imply the acceptance of insufficient knowledge or bypassing truth,Footnote ⁵³ but rather encourages the audience’s active engagement with the content. Research suggests that some degree of uncertainty stimulates critical thinking and decision-making both about how audiences relate to the conveyed message and about the acceptability of risks.Footnote ⁵⁴ The sense of agency and the ability to make sense of what we hear ourselves inspires responsibility. This is in addition to the responsibility assigned by the very structure of a narrative and roles played by its actors, heroes or villains; as Krauß and Bremer observe: ‘[n]arratives assign responsibility for risk governance; who is to be held accountable and who is entitled for action’.Footnote ⁵⁵

How stories and storytelling are or could be operationalised in the context of science and climate change communication needs to be explored further. Lessons from storytellers working with communities are very valuable, particularly on how to connect with local audiences and how to account for the cultural specificity of places.Footnote ⁵⁶ Equally important is cultural and literary scholarship, especially on features of narratives, structures, semiotic processes, and techniques of storytelling which over the centuries enabled people to engage with phenomena they may not have observed themselves, or the complexity of which they may not have fully understood. Most importantly, it is crucial to think about narratives and stories outside of their traditionally perceived disciplinary boundaries. The term ‘narrative’ has been evolving to become an interdisciplinary concept,Footnote ⁵⁷ and in the context of the climate change communication does not simply stand for a translation of scientific facts into a popular vernacular. As Krauß and Bremer emphasise, ‘the narrative approach challenges the exclusivity of the scientific definition of the climate problem and opens up new ways of dealing with a changing climate’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Without those new ways and without contextualising changes to connect with local experiences, practices, and knowledges to make sense of a global phenomenon, we may not have any useful narrative to tell.

20.2.2 Narrative’s Shortcomings

In a focused and practical context, the report How to Word It: The Nature and Climate Change Narrative’s Shortcomings (2021), created by The Twenties team led by Mateusz Galica and Marta Marczuk, and supported by the European Climate Foundation, suggests that the inability to ‘see things’ results from the ‘lack of convincing narrative’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The report makes an interesting attempt at capturing dominant narratives about climate change by text-mining several hundred publications focused on this topic.

The study’s goals were ‘to locate the primary threads of the story about climate change, to find factors and phenomena that have an exceptionally strong impact on the social imagination, and to verify the hypothesis regarding competing narratives built around the discussed problem’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The report also attempted at providing better understanding of how media discourse perpetuates culture–nature dualism and deals with scientific diagnoses calling for social and cultural changes. The study analysed 17,458 articles on climate change published on five most widely read English-language news pages responsible for 70% of news content on the Internet: BBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Daily Mail, and The Guardian. The analysed articles were published over a period of five years, between 1 April 2016 and 31 March 2021, marking the signing of the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, respectively. The data were collected by purpose-built software – a web-scrapping program – and analysed by the software.Footnote ⁶¹

A general message of the report is that the discussion on climate change emerging from the examined media sources is not only about climate change itself, but is more complex and multifaceted. The most important finding is that there are two clear dimensions of the climate change discourse: one dealing with social aspects and the other with environmental aspects. The split is presented in the form of network graph which shows a distribution of 2000 most frequently used words, e.g.: ‘people’, ‘work’, ‘live’ (for social aspects) and ‘world change’, ‘climate’, ‘national’, ‘government’, ‘global’ (for environmental aspects). The most important thematic groups (presented as words combined into clusters) reinforced the split: ‘climate change and the environment’; ‘transnational institutions and projects’; ‘national politics’ (for environment aspects), ‘media and information’; and ‘social life’ (for social aspects). Social and environmental topics are not directly connected and are rather treated as separate issues.Footnote ⁶² They are indirectly connected by concepts (presented as two phrase clouds) dealing with political issues and scientific issues. Political references mediating between these two dimensions include ‘national politics’, ‘government’ and ‘industry’ and topics intertwined with global dimensions, transnational institutions and projects.Footnote ⁶³ Science is another mediator between the two dimensions, but it is shown as focusing mostly on physical dimensions of climate change (species, wildlife, habitat) and environmental disasters. Science is also linked with general and abstract information, such as ‘devastation, pollution, catastrophe or destruction’.Footnote ⁶⁴

From the report we learn that the divide between thinking about social and cultural aspects of human life and environmental and climate issues is deep and has a major impact on thinking patterns and further communication. We learn that articles locating their topics closer to social issues are drawing a more optimistic image of the reality, focused on the future, economy, action, and agency. Another finding is that government-focused topics are likely to involve discussions on progress and development, and that scientific topics tend to present a more apocalyptic vision of the reality and are detached from everyday life.Footnote ⁶⁵ There is a clear distinction between talking about ‘humans’ and about ‘people’, with the former being a biological term used in articles which emphasise the impact of climate change, and the latter term being a social category occurring in texts of less environmental focus.Footnote ⁶⁶ The split explains – as the report also notices – that approaching climate change from cultural and identity perspectives, thus showing its complexity and multidimensionality, is not common and does not constitute a coherent approach.Footnote ⁶⁷

The report isolates 30 of the most significant collocations for the words ‘climate’ and ‘change’, demonstrating how we understand the issue of climate change. Among them are: ‘combat’, ‘fight’, and ‘tackle’ as well as ‘global’, ‘real’, ‘systemic’, and ‘radical’. It shows that media present climate change as a serious and global threat.Footnote ⁶⁸ This message, however, is not consistently supported. While the analysed articles imply that there is an element of specificity – for example, the implied relationship between climate change and disadvantaged groups such as indigenous communities, disabled people, and those below the poverty line – they also suggest that climate change affects primarily young people. Among articles focusing on solutions, topics dealing with national politics dominate, which gives a sense that everything is under control and being taken care of at the higher governmental level. It also implies that nature can be controlled and managed, and in this sense is subordinate.Footnote ⁶⁹

What the report shows is that, in spite of the acknowledged value of climate change communication becoming more personalised, contextualised, and appealing to emotions, information conveyed in mainstream media often follows deeply ingrained thought patterns according to which environmental and social concerns, science and social life, nature and culture belong to separate domains. It hence shows that changes at the higher level of social discourse are also needed, involving a ‘“climate correction” of our concepts and discourses’ that can be achieved through an engaged exchange between scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and cultural scholars.Footnote ⁷⁰

20.2.3 Environmental Rhetoric

Understanding climate change depends on the environmental rhetoric and discourses within which it is articulated. Ewa Bińczyk stresses that ‘the twenty-first century began with a surprising reconfiguration of concepts’, such as the concept of an ‘Anthropocene’ used to expose the current impact of man on the planet.Footnote ⁷¹ The term introduced by natural scientists quickly achieved media success much greater than the earlier concept of sustainable development. Its first uses in American media were recorded in 2010,Footnote ⁷² and the concept entered the Oxford English Dictionary four years later. However, it has not ordered and systematised our thinking about the values, purposes, and responsibilities towards the world and ourselves. Researchers argue whether it can be used as ‘a broad metaphor to motivate [a] holistic understanding of human impacts’ and some see a narrative approach and some storytelling as a potential to enable that.Footnote ⁷³ Specifically, Kunnas highlights storytelling’s capacity to present ‘a multifaceted picture of human agency in the Anthropocene’ and evade fatalistic visions frequent in media.Footnote ⁷⁴ The storytelling approach also encourages and facilitates a more nuanced reflection on tropes of the Anthropocene discourse and other concepts dominating the imagination.Footnote ⁷⁵

Although most of the environment discourses involve interdisciplinary perspectives and to some extent employ humanistic questions concerning culture, society and values, there seems to be a persistent resistance to considering disciplines such as literature, philosophy, gender, or postcolonial perspectives a crucial part of a meaningful discussion on environment and climate. In the early 2000s, an article published in the Australian Humanities Review by Deborah Bird Rose and Libby Robin brought about a new perspective on integrating humanities and natural sciences in environmental thinking. Their article, ‘The ecological humanities: an invitation’, introduced the concept of ecological humanities as a multidisciplinary domain aimed at traversing ‘the great divides between the sciences and the humanities, and between western and other ways of knowing nature’.Footnote ⁷⁶ In 2012, Deborah Rose and Thom van Dooren established the interdisciplinary periodical Environmental Humanities. Acknowledging that the field of environmental humanities is growing rapidly, the editors called for a qualitative research engaging with ‘fundamental questions of meaning, value, responsibility and purpose’, via a more sensitive and conceptually extensive approach to environmental issues and, at the same time, ‘rethinking the ontological exceptionality of the human’ and unsettling of dominant narratives.Footnote ⁷⁷

Thus, the voice of humanists has become essential in the context of environmental rhetoric.Footnote ⁷⁸ It is through this humanist lens that we learn that ‘nature’ is no longer objectified by technoscience as ‘natural resources’, but has become a deeply normative and problematic concept.Footnote ⁷⁹ We learn, following Dipesh Chakrabarty, that the idea of freedom can easily become ‘a blanket category for diverse imaginations of human autonomy and sovereignty’.Footnote ⁸⁰ We realise that our understanding of the living world is instantly unsettled if we attempt to overcome the nature/culture binary that locates humans in a separate imaginary realm, outside of nature.Footnote ⁸¹ We also learn that the environmental rhetoric of the Anthropocene often points to the conditions of ‘disappointment’ and ‘helplessness’ in the context of climate policy. We learn about the rhetorical practices and strategies of the so-called denialism and greenwashing that are important industry propaganda tools in the twenty-first century.Footnote ⁸² We also get insights into indigenous knowledge of climate systems but also, most importantly, into different ways of comprehending human presence on the Earth.

The evolving rhetoric of the Anthropocene is essential to understanding the situation in which we have found ourselves, but also to enabling changes – profound social and economic changes that need to happen. Bińczyk claims that ‘there are connections between the conceptual structures of the Anthropocene and a kind of stagnation characterising contemporary climate policy’.Footnote ⁸³ These connections may not be immediately obvious, but what is clear is that there is something in our thinking about the world that legitimises this stagnation. There are, as Bińczyk continues, thought mechanisms most likely growing from the European tradition of thinking about nature that legitimise approaches such as ‘discounting the future, denialism, paternalistic ignorance of alternative values against the value of economic growth, setting “safe” risk limits and contingency plans, believing that future innovations will save us (the so-called technical imperative), nihilism’.Footnote ⁸⁴ And so what Bińczyk and other eco-humanists insist we need is a post-anthropocentric, environmentally focused correction of our concepts and theories, transformation of many key philosophical ideas (not only of nature and man, but also of time, history, agency, responsibility, and even politics and society). An attempt at renegotiating concepts that can be used to both unsettle dominant narratives and offer new constructive approaches to thinking about the human and non-human world has been taken at a higher level by, for example, The Environmental Humanities journal. The Living Lexicon series, published in a special section of the journal, offers 1,000-word essays that focus on particular terms such as ‘endangered’, ‘fossil’, ‘mitigation’, or ‘memory’. The authors discuss the terms from scholarly perspectives, but also challenge their dominant meanings by using more creative and personal approaches.

Among the concepts important for climate change communication to reflect the reality experienced by individuals and communities are loss and trauma. The irreversible loss of nature and the world as we used to know it has become one of the key issues of discussion on the Anthropocene. This results in more common than ever experience of pain, anxiety, chronic distress, as well as grief by individuals and communities. Examining the experiences of citizens in the Upper Hunter region in Australia, resulting from the impact of open-cut coal mining on their everyday lives, Glenn Albrecht created in 2003 the concept of ‘solastalgia’. He explains that, combining the concepts of ‘solace’ and ‘desolation’, ‘solastalgia’ captures a ‘feeling of chronic distress caused by negatively perceived changes to a home and its landscape’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although developed to conceptualise the experiences of a specific community, the term quickly became very popular both in research and popular culture. It became one of those terms that, by identifying and naming emotions, feelings, and reactions to climate change, allow us to understand and respond to them more effectively. It allows us to better understand, for example, the experiences of climate change observed on Australia’s Erub Island in the Torres Strait, its gendered nature, and a deteriorating connection to self and country.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, perceptions of loss resulting from climate change may vary and they remain an understudied area.Footnote ⁸⁷

Dobrowolska and Ormond-Skeaping propose looking at climate change through the prism of trauma research and claim this may ‘help create a coherent, global narrative about climate change and its effects’.Footnote ⁸⁸ As visual artists, they use art to explore representations and expressions of loss and destruction. Psychologists argue that a narrative engagement with loss, pain, and suffering is essential if the communication on climate change is to reflect and shape ethical attitude towards reality. Such an attitude can be shaped, but we need ‘a real sense of tragedy’ to develop a deep narrative that refers to the core values of who we are as people.Footnote ⁸⁹ Only by having an in-depth understanding of the tragedy can we develop a meaningful sense of hope,Footnote ⁹⁰ which, as studies show, is lacking among the public, together with ideas about what may promote hope.Footnote ⁹¹ As Marlon et al. conclude, ‘this hope gap is especially relevant in the face of increasing climate impacts and insufficient national and international actions thus far to address the root causes of the problem’.Footnote ⁹²

A narrative approach can also help with a philosophical reflection on the very inability to see things. One of the ideas aimed at improving our understanding of where we are at in a climate debate and correcting our thinking patterns is the philosophical concept of a ‘hyperobject’ created by Timothy Morton.Footnote ⁹³ A hyperobject is something that cannot be seen because it is too big to notice or immobilised due to its being omnipresent, both in time and space. However, its symptoms can be documented, such as the effects of hurricanes, the melting of glaciers, or the displacement of people due to floods. While for Morton we cannot see the ‘object’, clearly because of its enormous size, for Rob Nixon it is the speed of the process that hampers our perception.Footnote ⁹⁴ His idea of slow violence refers to almost invisible, gradual and slow changes related to environmental degradation, which stand at the opposite pole to spectacular events and natural disasters. Because they are slow, we cannot see them or perceive them as threatening.

This inability to ‘see things’ and act accordingly, the lack of understanding and vision and insufficient ways of knowing, have been increasingly identified as the ‘crisis of the imagination’. In his 1995 book The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell examines cultural reflections on nature and environment and arrives at the diagnosis that the environmental crisis involves ‘a crisis of the imagination’ and thus requires ‘betters ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relation to it’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Two decades later, Amitav Ghosh repeats this observation: ‘the climate crisis is a crisis of culture, thus of the imagination’.Footnote ⁹⁶ While still potentially connected to the size and speed of climate change, the crisis of imagination seems to have deeper roots and results not from the loss but from an ontological deficit of adequate imaginative frameworks, models and approaches. These are being developed with the humanities and social sciences being, on the one hand, redefined as integrating the human and non-human, and undermining the dominant discourse of the duality of culture and nature, and, on the other hand, integrated with life sciences. These transformations are both supported by and themselves support new ways of narrating the world, ourselves, and the change itself.Footnote ⁹⁷ This is a good start. However, in the face of the climate crisis, but also stagnation of the debate on climate change and the initiated transformations, a more focused and informed narrative engagement is crucial.

If the destructive actions of people are indeed caused by harmful ideas about the natural environment or by a complete lack of imagination, journalism offers a limited set of tools. To address the crisis of imagination we need to understand that these new ways of communicating climate challenges are more likely to appear at the intersection of science, literature, and art. There is a lot to learn from historic narratives and artistic expressions of the understanding of places and place-based experiences.Footnote ⁹⁸ But there are also new initiatives, involving new methods and approaches. These include artistic, literary and performative interventions, community projects and participatory actions.Footnote ⁹⁹ Importantly, as Baztan et al. highlight in their research on community trust-building for climate services through arts, the integration of art and science is not to use the arts to communicate scientific findings, but rather to gain ‘access to elements that are generally excluded from scientific inquiry to convey a more complete picture of the challenges at hand’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It is at this intersection where re-configuring concepts,Footnote ¹⁰¹ re-negotiating established paradigms,Footnote ¹⁰² and re-articulating the scientific description of the worldFootnote ¹⁰³ may most effectively take place.