This spring, I took a course called Climate.comms.now at the Open University of the University of Helsinki, which dealt with climate communication. As my final thesis, I wrote, among other things, the essay Storytelling in Climate Communication. Below is a summary of the essay. A longer version, the final thesis of the course, can also be found on the Climate Grandparents website.
Communication about Climate Change
Climate change mitigation and stopping requires action from governments, companies and all of us. The biggest changes require political decisions, for example changes in legislation, taxation, etc. However, everyone can influence their own consumption and emissions to some extent. How can an individual person influence? We can vote for candidates who support climate action in elections. I have also discovered civic activism: together with other like-minded people, we demand that decision-makers act for the climate and we do what we can in our own lives.
Climate change is a scientifically complex phenomenon, involving many uncertainties and probabilities that can be difficult to understand and communicate. Climate change mitigation actions have not been initiated on the required scale or in a timely manner because their urgency has not been understood. Communication has failed.
Climate change is a global problem, but it is important to talk about it at the local level. How does it manifest itself in people’s immediate environment? Climate change is usually seen as a threat that will happen in the distant future. Therefore, it does not receive as much weight and attention as immediate threats. According to Finnish researcher and author Mira Hulkkonen, change is driven by knowledge. For example, we need to understand how the greenhouse effect works and what the feedbacks and tipping points of the climate system mean in order to understand the urgency. We also need to understand why the need for urgency arising from scientific knowledge does not compel us to act and what would compel us to act.
Climate actions now!
A recent research report, Later is too late, found that in every country surveyed, there is significant support for immediate government action on climate change. Across the 23 countries surveyed, an average of 77 % of people agree with the statement: “It is important that governments do everything they can to limit the impacts of climate change,” with just over 10 % disagreeing. The data clearly showed that in all countries, love for the next generation was the dominant reason for climate change mitigation. This reason was 12 times more popular than job creation.
Storyteller Helen Shaw also says that communicating the reality of climate change, global warming, and climate action can feel distant from our everyday lives and experiences if we don’t make this change a story that makes people care. The arts and humanities are essential to bringing science, knowledge, and facts into awareness, culture, and consciousness.
Why storytelling is also effective in climate communication
In his video Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, world-renowned researcher and environmental activist George Marshall explores the psychological mechanism that allows us to know something is true but act as if it is not. After speaking with world-leading experts in psychology, economics, risk assessment, linguistics, cultural anthropology and evolutionary psychology, Marshall confirms that people are primed to react most strongly to visible and immediate threats posed by the “enemy”. Climate change is invisible, unprecedented, long-term, affects us indirectly and is self-inflicted. According to Marshall, our behavior is largely due to the structure of the human brain, which is described in his video. By explaining climate change scientifically, we are constantly speaking to the intellectual side of the brain, not the emotional side. Because stories are fundamenal to the human brain, storytelling is also effective in communicating about climate change.
Storytelling
Emotions and stories are used effectively in marketing and politics. They can also be used to promote sustainable choices. Stories have probably been told throughout human history for both entertainment and profit. They have been used to pass on traditional knowledge from generation to generation.
There is a huge amount of literature and other sources available on storytelling. I have reviewed some. Stories, images, videos, songs and poems can be used. Storytelling engages people much more effectively than simply presenting facts, charts or figures. While the amount of bad news about the impacts of climate change has increased in recent years, positive things are happening. It is good to tell about them and use humor whenever possible. We need credible, compelling and attractively told descriptions of a life that is admirable and desirable, but that respects the limits of the planet. Stories have the power to create meanings that motivate good choices.
Per Grankvist’s storytelling
Sweden’s largest state-funded innovation program, Viable Cities, is a strategic innovation program focused on the transition to climate-neutral and sustainable cities. The program’s mission is climate-neutral cities by 2030, where everyone has a good life within the limits of the planet. Since 2019, Viable Cities has been developing a method that helps decision-makers and authorities understand what a climate-neutral future would look like. The work is led by chief storyteller Per Grankvist. Here too, the insight is that emotional engagement is key to changing people’s behavior. Presenting facts is not enough. A better approach is to make people feel that something is emotionally true, locally relevant and scientifically accurate. The starting point of the method is that a climate-smart everyday life is not much different from our current life.
Storytelling in climate communication by climate grandparents
The main appeal to decision-makers is the demonstrations on the steps of the Parliament House every Friday during parliamentary sessions. This activity is also a kind of storytelling. Finnish climate grandparents are members of the European Grandparents (EGC) organization, whose members are national senior organizations fighting for climate justice.
In the EGC positive communication group, we are looking for effective ways to communicate climate. We have considered storytelling to be an effective method and have promoted it. Our biggest source of inspiration so far has been Per Grankvist. Groups from different countries have shared different storytelling formats and applied their own. In Finland and now also in some other countries, we have stolen the idea from young people of short pop-up videos on current topics that are published on social media (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky). They do not require complicated technology.
Sources
Hulkkonen Mira. Climate Epiphanies. Harnessing the Superpowers of the Human Mind for the Good of the Planet, Gaudeamus, 2023, 399 pp.
Report Later is too late. https://potentialenergycoalition.org/guides-and-reports/global-report/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIe1cNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHS5gP37zyg3XlFxIVJtf-6ICoWLPJvkDsoWVzXxF9K0KuW4uYdSbFgIX2Q_aem_j4MvEFt83UYvbgTG5bD5Vw
Krznaric Roman. TED video How to Be a Good Ancestor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61hRq0D8Zcs
Shaw Helen. Why we need to stop talking about ‘Climate Change’, The New Climate. Sep 17, 2023 https://medium.com/the-new-climate/why-we-need-to-stop-talking-about-climate-change-add41105befb
Shaw Helen. Imagining the Unthinkable. The Power of Storytelling in Climate Action. Nov 5, 2023 https://medium.com/@athena.media1/imagining-the-unthinkable-the-power-of-storytelling-in-climate-change-118a27f4ca0a
Shaw Helen. Moving from apathy to empathy. Aug 22, 2024 https://medium.com/@athena.media1/cutting-through-the-white-noise-of-climate-change-c14f5975a057
Marshal George. Video Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=726BZat208A
A book Children for change, edited by Konnie Huq. https://pop-up.org.uk/childrenforchange/
Grankvist, Per Viable Cities – keynote from Stockholm +50. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7YEvILR99A
Grankvist, Per. From numbers to narratives — a new way of talking about life within planetary boundaries. Telling stories about climate neutrality in cities — a transformative practice. Published in Viable Cities, Jun 26, 2022.
Grankvist, Per. Be brave, but don’t be boring. https://medium.com/@pergrankvist/be-brave-but-dont-be-boring-c9ce72f1c3ee
Sirpa Pelttari