Public awareness of, and concern about climate change is an important ingredient for bringing about policy change. How best then can we characterise public understanding of this topic? Beliefs about climate change have been described as being as complex as the issue itself but it is possible to point to some key patterns and trends. Back
Do people need to know more to care more?
Are the public disengaged with scientific topics like climate change simply because they lack knowledge in the subject? It might be easy to assume this, but research has shown that the relationship between scientific literacy and concern about/engagement with climate change is not straightforward. That doesn’t mean we should dismiss knowledge as a factor that
Communicating uncertainty
Uncertainty is very ordinary. We all navigate uncertainties in our everyday life: the weather, when we might get sick, who’ll win an election, whether the bus will be on time or get stuck in traffic. We often see arguments for inaction on climate change based on uncertainty – if we don’t know for sure how
Workshop 2: The science is settled? Exploring expert views
If there’s one thing about public engagement with climate change you can be certain about, it is that climate change doesn’t communicate itself. There is now a wealth of climate communication research, plus decades of practitioner expertise on public engagement to draw on. But how much agreement is there among climate communication specialists on what
Video: Sharing perspectives on climate change
As part of our community workshops in Manchester, the Climate Communication Project and the Manchester Climate Change Agency encouraged members of community groups to share their perspectives on climate change. Here, you can listen to these views.
Climate poetry written by local communities
As part of the Climate Communication Project we carried out a series of workshops with three different community groups, based in Manchester, Stockport and Bristol. The workshops involved open discussions about what climate change meant to these communities and how they perceived it to be communicated.
The Climate Communication Project survey
A survey of the climate communication community forms part of The Climate Communication Project and will allow us to understand how a range of specialists carry out their work, to share and promote best practice in the UK, and to point to areas where more investment and attention is needed. We are interested to hear
Workshop 1: Auditing activity & synthesising research
How do you get people to engage with climate change? Having a conversation about it is a hard sell at the best of times. As importantly (and this is where it gets tricky right off the bat), how do you get people to act? These are the million-dollar questions for those of us working in
Workshop 1: Evaluating the project
In early January, all the Climate Communication Project partners were brought together to provide constructive input for the project ahead. This was our first project meeting, and was designed to ask our partners a) how can we best audit public engagement with climate change in the UK and b) how can we appraise and share
Time for a climate communication audit
Over the last decade, the level of interest in climate change communication has grown rapidly – there’s now a huge number of people, organisations and institutions involved in the theory and practice of public engagement. In part, the enthusiasm for public engagement has come from the realisation that without significant and sustained public support, technological