Wild Ones #12: The Promise and Pitfalls of Visual Climate Communication
A weekly digest of ideas, news, and research in environmental communication
Hello all!
I hope you’ve had a good week!
Last week I shared a piece I wrote: 8 Evidence-Based Principles For Impactful Visual Communication of Climate Change: Eight principles to guide you in making better visual choices in your climate communication and activism.
I wanted to write it after learning more about the fascinating work the UK-based organization Climate Visuals is doing to develop a photography library of climate change causes and solutions.
The photo library is being developed based on survey research on the effectiveness of visuals to tell more powerful stories about the impacts and solutions to climate change. I didn’t know too much about the challenges photojournalists around the world are facing in telling climate stories, both to bear witness to the catastrophes of the climate crisis, but also to tell new stories about solutions to address the climate crisis.
An image from the Climate Visuals library
Why might new climate visuals be needed? That was my question too. So I decided to write about it hoping to learn a bit more about the current state of climate photography in the process.
As Toby Smith, a photojournalist and program lead for Climate Visuals explains, one of the important motivations behind developing the climate photo library comes from the organization’s ‘theory of social change’: a theory of how we improve society.
In an insightful blog post, Smith describes how Climate Visuals is inspired in part by how the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) envisions the capacity for journalists to change the world through their reporting. The basic idea, as SJN puts it, is this:
“There are two ways journalists improve society: 1) spotlight harmful things or 2) spotlight helpful things. Journalists have the power to do both but focus far more on the first.”
One of the inspiring aspects of Climate Visuals is their emphasis on telling visual stories about climate solutions, and to do so they believe deeply in empowering local journalists around the world to tell the complex climate stories that aren’t being told. However, part of the problem is that the status-quo-disrupting stories we need now more than ever are often politically dangerous to tell in much of the world. As Toby Smith puts it, “The battle lines of the free press often track closely to the boundaries of the climate justice nexus.”
(On a side note, this solutions-based approach to visual storytelling also resonates with the work being done by Beautiful Solutions, an on-going project created by the journalist Naomi Klein to collect transformative climate stories and solutions from around the world)
After sharing my piece on the Twittersphere, it was great to see the feedback from Toby, and hear that they have exciting plans for developing the photo library in the coming months!
I also shared my piece – 8 Evidence-Based Principles For Impactful Visual Communication of Climate Change – with the ecolinguistics and environmental communication research community and got some great feedback too. Arran Stibbe, Professor of Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire, raised some important questions to consider in response to my piece on climate visuals about the potential for climate communication to promote long-term social change:
“I would only add that it's worth asking 'What story am I telling about climate change and does it resonate with my values and knowledge?' That's an important question in addition to 'is it effective?' because you are potentially influencing people's deep conceptualisations of climate change, which may be more important long term than immediate action in terms of recycling more etc. A story that 'climate change can easily be stopped through small personal actions' might be 'effective' short term but fail to help in preparing people for the enormous social changes necessary and the inevitable destruction that climate change will cause in the future whatever we do. So the other question that's important to ask is 'what do I want people to do?' - recycle more, buy a hybrid car, demand vast social and political change, build resiliant communities which can adapt to inevitable enviornmental change?”
I think these questions lie at the core of how we can address the climate crisis through communication. In particular, Stibbe points out some of the pitfalls of climate communication if we are overly focused on the ‘effectiveness’ of our communication strategies, where effectiveness often means the communication strategies “most likely to achieve an immediate behavioural goal” (Corner and Randall 2011).
One problem with focusing on short-term effectiveness is that, as climate communication scholars Adam Corner and Alex Randall put it,
“What if the most effective way of promoting pro-environmental behaviour ‘A’ was to pursue a strategy that was detrimental to the achievement of long term pro-environmental strategy ‘Z’?”
(like, for example, when CEOs publically pledge to be environmentally sustainable, yet somehow this makes them gives them license to be even more unsustainable! huh?).
One concern I have now, and that I’ll delve deeper into in future posts, is that much of the climate communication mobilized by environmental campaigns today builds on the dominant communication strategies derived from social marketing theories of behavior change (Thøgersen & Crompton 2009).
As a framework for designing behavior change, social marketing has become an incredibly popular approach among governments and non-profits to develop communication campaigns to address environmental challenges, in part because social marketing approaches are so flexible to suit the goals of different campaigns. But also because social marketing gives organizations a practical way to measure concrete behavior changes – like driving less, recycling more…
But in their research article on the pitfalls of social marketing approaches to climate communication – “Selling climate change?” – Corner and Randall distill the main problem of social marketing like this:
“The principles of social marketing have no capacity to resolve this conflict [between immediate and long-term behavior change']” because “they are limited to maximising the success of the immediate behavioural programme.”
In other words, when social marketing isn’t grounded in deeper knowledge and values about how to promote long-term transformations in communities to address the climate crisis, social marketing may actually end up being counter-productive in promoting action to address climate change.
This isn’t to say we should dismiss social marketing as an important tool in our environmental communications toolkit. For example, visual climate communication depends on strategies that strive to be effective in evoking immediate emotions through images that resonate with particular audiences and (should) make clear calls to action in their audience. But at the same time, we need to be very careful about how and when we use social marketing strategies to not encourage individual behaviors that may seem helpful in the short term, but that serve us little (and may even be counter-productive) if we want to achieve the kind of long-term, sustainable transformations in society that are so desperately needed to address the climate crisis.
I’m getting myself into some pretty challenging territory here to cover in a single post, but please share any thoughts or questions you have in the comments section:)
In future posts, I’ll be sharing some concrete, real-world examples of how different environmental campaigns are actually navigating these communication challenges, so stay tuned!
In the meantime, check out this helpful – and short! – essay about this ‘short-term/long term behavior conflict’ in environmental communication by Tom Crompton from Common Cause).
Writings From My Desk
Speaking of climate visuals, you may have heard about Michael Moore’s film, Planet of the Humans that came out earlier this year. You may have also heard that there was some pretty heavy criticism of the film by climate scientists and activists when it came out. I even wrote a bit of lengthy piece from my perspective as a discourse analyst, which you can read here:
I’m mentioning it here because, among many other problems with the film, YouTube has taken it down due to copyright infringement of Climate Visuals photojournalist Toby Smith’s work. In my view, if you’re looking for a case study in how not to visually communicate climate change, this film was it.
Thanks as always! And feel free to leave a comment, question, or emoji about any thoughts/feelings you might have about visual climate communication:)
See you next week!
Gavin Lamb, Ph.D.