Willem Steenkamp, senior writer and editor at Flow Communications writes that for too long, the dominant narrative about climate change has been one of apocalypse: collapsing ice shelves, parched earth, species extinctions, bleached coral, catastrophic storms and even the current northern hemisphere heatwaves, conjure up fears of irreversible environmental calamity.
While climate change science justifies the urgency, we are indeed hurtling headlong towards disastrous changes to the Earth’s climate, communicating the science has brought us to a psychological tipping point. Instead of galvanising us into action, relentless alarmism triggers climate anxiety, a chronic fear of environmental doom that leads to paralysis rather than participation.
As communicators, we must recognise that fear only motivates people up to a point. In the face of a threat as enormous (and abstract) as global warming, our natural response to fear is often to freeze as a way of self-protection; to give in to our feelings of powerlessness. When the problem feels insurmountable, individual actions, such as recycling or saving water, appear trivial and pointless.
Instead, to inspire meaningful change in the greater public, we must move beyond this doom-and-gloom approach and make the connection between urgency (the need to act) and agency (the ability to act).
To be sure, we must be straightforward about the realities of climate change; there is no denying or sugar-coating it. But we must pair this honesty with practical, hopeful choices. People will not change their behaviour because they are frightened, but they most likely will if they believe their actions matter.
This requires a shift from global abstractions to local realities. For example, for a resident of Cape Town, the threat of ‘day zero’ water shortages is far more motivating to be water-wise than the melting of distant glaciers. By focusing on local solutions, such as water resilience or urban greening, we make addressing the climate crisis tangible and relevant.
In South Africa, we have powerful stories to replace the narrative of catastrophe. Community-led carbon capture and storage initiatives in the Eastern Cape, for example, are not only addressing global warming, they are creating jobs and restoring ecosystems. In the Northern Cape, dozens of solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar power installations feed green electricity into our national grid, stimulating local employment and driving clean energy uptake by industrial users such as mines and factories throughout South Africa.
When we highlight successes such as these, we demonstrate that a sustainable future is not just necessary, it is desirable and possible.
As communicators, we also have to ditch technical jargon, which creates a barrier between experts and the public. Terms such as ‘anthropogenic’, ‘carbon sequestration’ or ‘mitigation strategies’ sound smart but probably mean little to many people. Rather, we should use more accessible language that is easy to grasp and culturally relevant to the audience. Use words like ‘we’ and ‘our’, emphasising our sense of collective responsibility.
In a similar vein, we must move away from a one-size-fits-all approach to how we say things to various audiences: a small-scale farmer’s concerns about crop failure are inherently different from a business executive’s focus on ESG compliance, for instance. This is Communications 101, effective messaging always considers the audience first, and tailors the ‘ask’ to what is achievable for that audience.
Ultimately, our role is not to make the public more afraid, rather, it is to ensure that each of us feels like a protagonist in the story of environmental restoration, not a helpless witness to its collapse. Pairing credible information with local success stories and clear, actionable steps allows us to turn climate anxiety into climate action.
And when people believe that they can make a difference, they usually do.
FLOW COMMUNICATIONS
www.flowsa.com
