How to make friends and decarbonise people: The need for user-centered advocacy within the climate action movement
I’m Tom and I work at Unboxed, a digital product agency working with a number of public sector organisations. In January I attended #OneGreenGov and pitched a session to discuss what is needed to create narratives that resonate with different parts of society and stimulate climate action. This blog post follows on from that session and reflects on what I discussed on the day.
For the last twenty years or so the vast majority of arguments made to support climate action have been based on a moral imperative. “We must change our ways” the argument goes “to save rainforests / coral reefs / polar bears” or “protect people in developing countries that are most severely affected”.
This has led to a campaigning approach typically based around stating the importance of lifestyle sacrifices such as flying less, using public transport rather than a car and reducing consumption, particularly of plastic and meat.
This approach has been somewhat successful. Flexitarian, vegetarian and vegan diets are rising — which I think is at least partly driven by growing awareness of the carbon footprint of agriculture. It also feels as though public opinion has shifted against carrier bags, single use plastics and excessive packaging. At a societal level however the step-change required to avoid a looming apocalypse hasn’t happened. Last summer’s Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests were successful in getting institutions to declare climate emergencies, but there is a significant mismatch between the amount of coverage the protests have received and the amount of lifestyle change made by the public.
Given the stakes it’s important to reflect on why this is the case
I think a key issue is the messaging. The “lifestyle change as moral imperative” argument may work when speaking to people with an existing interest, but it also pitches the movement headlong into the middle of the culture war being waged across western societies.
Our current arguments mainly preach to the choir and if we are to assemble the coalition required to avert the worst effects of climate change, we must better tailor our advocacy to different audiences.
In January I pitched a session at OneGreenGov to delve into this further. It’s a big topic and we didn’t have time to cover everything I was thinking, but at heart I think we need to stop making this a moral challenge for humanity and instead treat it as an engineering problem to be solved.
We need storytellers
The key takeaway for me from the discussion was that for advocacy to succeed we need to be good storytellers and I learned of Per Grankvist, the Chief Storyteller of Sweden’s Viable Cities Programme. Read more about him below:
Grankvist takes the view that it is not enough to paint a vision of a decarbonised future, we must connect it to people’s lives and show how we will improve the quality of it. Telling these stories is the key to making things personal enough to engage people, however the stories need to be anchored in a way that resonates with its audience.
The challenge is that as a global problem, and climate change is inherently disempowering to individuals.
It’s hard to build engagement when countries in the developing world are still building coal power plants. As a people we’re also not brilliant at seeing beyond the here and now, with good intentions frequently lost in the shuffle of day-to-day concerns. This is particularly true when people are struggling on low incomes and the more environmentally-friendly choice is more expensive.
Change needs to happen at the societal level and so rather than exhorting individuals to make sacrifices, we should be building a coalition broad enough that governments can be confident that we are representative and take appropriate action.
To build this coalition we need to tell not one story, but many different stories each resonating with different parts of society and engaging those that have not supported action previously.
Research conducted into the science of persuasion, for example by Robert Cialdini, can guide us in how we craft these stories. It’s a big enough subject to warrant a blog of its own but elements include:
- finding advocates that people in a community can relate to,
- showing people actions their peers are taking, and,
- asking people to make small commitments towards actions of their own.
So how do we tell these stories?
The obvious first step for these stories then, is research to identify our potential audiences and their concerns. From this, we can try to find people with credibility amongst those audiences and start to identify what messaging would most likely resonate with and empower them when advocating for action.
Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, for example, has led to Catholic dioceses in England divesting from fossil fuels:
As a first pass, I think some of these messages could include:
1.The national security view: With North Sea oil production in decline Britain is highly reliant on the Middle East and Russia for oil and gas. With the building of Hinkley Point C we will give China access to a critical part of our national infrastructure. Is it appropriate for our national infrastructure, and thus, security to be reliant on other countries when investment in renewables could make us energy independent?
2.The clean air view: Outside the scientific community, views as to whether climate change is real can vary. There is more consensus however on other impacts that traffic and power generation have on our environment in terms of nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, ammonia and particulates that affect air quality.
This is especially true in urban areas where heavy traffic is leading to respiratory problems in children. If climate change wasn’t a problem, wouldn’t we still want our children to live in a healthy environment by moving away from fossil fuels to cleaner alternatives?
3.The marketing view: This is by no means a groundbreaking argument. To quote former General Electric CEO and climate change sceptic Jack Welch in 2009 “whether you believe in global warming or not…If you’re in a company, you’d better be pushing those [green] products because the world wants these products”.
Whereas to date most advocacy has been focused on large companies that often respond with “greenwashing” I think there’s more opportunity now than ever before to only spend money with companies that can demonstrate a commitment to reducing the impact of their business and supply chain.
Kate Raworth’s work on doughnut economics is interesting in this regard, and Microsoft’s commitment to become carbon negative by 2030 will perhaps become an example of what that looks like in practice.
Voting with our wallets in this way may be harder for those on lower incomes but the more that those of us that can afford it do so, the quicker it will become a necessity for companies, rather than a differentiator.
4. The economic view: This can essentially be summed up by the ideas behind the Green New Deal but I was disappointed to hear from a Labour party member that it hadn’t cut through on the doorstep in London during the last election campaign. I wonder whether this is partly due to location and whether it would get more traction in former industrial parts of the UK.
It’s impossible to separate economics from politics, but this approach would require careful positioning to ensure this is seen as something that is pragmatic, rather than overtly political.
In the first half of the 19th century London was dumping the effluent of 2.5m people into the Thames. The heavily polluted river was also used for drinking water which resulted in outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and typhus. One typhoid epidemic in 1853 killed 15,000 people.
Despite campaigns in London newspapers, efforts to tackle the problem consisted of lots of discussion and little action. Although the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers was established in 1848 it was only ten years later that work began to resolve the issue.
The trigger for this wasn’t another epidemic but the Great Stink of 1858, a particularly hot June that led to the stench of baking sewage permeating the newly rebuilt Palace of Westminster. Within two months the Metropolis Local Management Amendment Bill became law and work started on the modern sewage system.
The lesson to be taken from this is that when necessary governments can act quickly to tackle problems, even if sometimes seeming to respond to the “wrong” triggers.
We need to better target our message to trigger people to action in a way that is meaningful for them, and to assemble a coalition of people across society so large that political parties are unable to dismiss this as only representative of parts of the electorate, or relegate it behind other concerns.
We need to find messages beyond the moral imperative that speak to everyone and to do this we need to deal with the world as it is, not as we want it to be and engage with people on their terms.
