The echo chamber of climate communication
George Buchan examines why climate change messaging frequently fails to resonate beyond like-minded audiences.
Image: Alex Andrews | Pexels
As governments, businesses and communities intensify efforts to address climate change, public communication has become one of the most important tools in driving action. Yet despite growing awareness and concern, meaningful change remains limited, raising important questions about how the climate crisis is being communicated to the public.
Messaging on climate change fails to drive meaningful behavioural change for two reasons. Firstly, it relies on narratives that fail to understand the priorities of the public. Secondly, it speaks to an echo chamber of like-minded people rather than society as a whole. Both are fundamental barriers to meaningful, widespread action, and the solution to both can be found in opinion research.
The key to moving the public to action is in quantifying public perceptions in a meaningful way. Most importantly, this includes understanding how a desired outcome fits into the real-life priority list of an ordinary person. Recent UK Government surveys indicate 80 per cent of the population expresses concern about climate change. But, this number does not tell the whole story. These surveys show high concern but mask a critical gap; there are other issues which are also concerns.
The nuance lies in whether people see climate effects as a direct disruption or threat to them and their families or if competing issues represent more of a threat. Cost-of-living pressures, intensified since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, eclipse climate worries for many because they see the direct negative effect on a day-to-day basis. Families struggle to heat homes, afford school runs or sustain businesses. It is logical to take action to deal with a clear everyday issue rather than a more distant one. Climate change, in contrast, is seen as a distant issue. Sometimes literally – in other parts of the world – and sometimes temporally – an issue for the future, not today.
This does not mean that climate change is not a concern, just that other issues are more pressing. I have sat in focus groups and tried to raise the level of concern around climate change by exposing respondents to facts around rising average temperatures, increasing forest fires and issues with soil fertility. None of these facts made taking climate action more pressing. The reason? It wasn’t affecting them directly; the increasing cost of living was.
But, it’s not just limited to that. A pothole on your street, a doctor's appointment delay or rising energy bills command attention over elections or foreign affairs, let alone climate forecasts. My research echoes this: significant portions acknowledge climate change but do not view it as immediately personal, so it ranks below urgent survival needs.
Living within a bubble
The problems of competing priorities are exacerbated by much communication around climate change occurring in echo chambers. In focus groups I have conducted, members of the public were unable to accurately define the meaning of ‘Net Zero’. This is a phrase used consistently throughout climate messaging, from governments to corporations. Yet, swathes of the public do not accurately understand the words’ meaning. How can you be expected to prioritise an issue if you are not aware of key terms used to talk about it?
Clients, in any given sector, spend their entire careers thinking about specific issues. They fail to understand that the majority of the population does not spend the same amount, or maybe even any, time thinking about their sector or issue of interest. As a result, they don’t understand terms which seem normal, such as ‘Net Zero’, which leads to communication issues. The solution is to ground yourself in the perceptions of the public through in-depth opinion research. We all live in bubbles, and it is hubristic to assume that your own perception is ‘normal’ or representative. The lack of climate action is testament to this truth.
When you conduct opinion research about climate change, you quickly see a picture of detached groups having very different conversations. Group A is talking about Net Zero, greenhouse gas emissions and eating less meat, and Group B is concerned about whether or not they can afford petrol for the school run. This has become exacerbated as frustration has mounted over lack of action.
Raising climate change to climate crisis was an attempt to bridge the gap between the two groups and to elevate the priority of climate change vs other issues. It was always destined to fail because it fails to understand current perceptions and, crucially, what motivates action. The solution to the issue is not to try and make people care more about climate change; that does not work. The solution is to tie the solutions to climate change to the solutions to the problems which are keeping people up at night, such as the cost of living.
George Buchan is the founder of George Buchan Insight, an organisation that conducts research programmes for market-leading companies and political parties across the UK and internationally.