I am koala, but I am not sure I am changing votes

The idea here seems to be to make climate change real – to stop talking about the abstract science and to connect it to real things, and real people’s lives. This is a good thing. For too long climate change communication have been focused too heavily around the ‘science’. The idea has been that we need people to know about the science and then they will take action – if they just understood, they would change their ways. I’ve written about how this is problematic in the past. In my piece climate denial is natural, I wrote:

As, Wolf and Moser explain though, by building into feelings of guilt, the research shows that this can have negative effects:

“More knowledge of a problem does not necessarily, directly, and by itself lead to a change in behaviour, and sometimes can actually hinder behaviour change.”

There is a whole raft of research around this that basically shows that hammering the science does not create change, and can in fact have negative impacts – it can make people scared and then recoil into denial as a defence mechanism.

And it is good therefore that WWF has shifted the framing here. What I see them doing is trying to turn this into a moral issue – not an abstract science issue. Climate change has real impacts, and real impacts that affect our lives – and it is our moral responsibility to halt those impacts. There is some good research on why climate change doesn’t cause moral outrage, and why it is important that we make it do so.

But unfortunately, I think WWF has slightly missed the mark in the way it has done this. The slogan of the campaign is ‘I am real’, and it features a number of advertisements of ‘real’ things that are affected by climate change. Each has a person talking to the screen about that thing and how it is hurt by climate change. There is ‘I am planet Earth’, ‘I am koala’, ‘I am turtle’ and ‘I am Great Barrier Reef’.

You notice the one thing missing? Humans.

And this is a constant problem the environment movement faces, in particular around climate change. This is what I would call the ‘polar bear problem’. Polar bears have probably become the most common image used to connect people with climate change – I don’t think we can look at polar bears now without thinking climate change (I have used the polar bear for my cover image on this article on purpose). The problem is however, that research shows that imagery of the polar bear (or other images that induce fear) is good for getting attention, but doesn’t motivate people to take action. Much of the problem here is that it induces too much fear in people, and so people aim to hide from it – to escape from the fear (there is a good paper called Fear Wont Do It that explains this).

But the other problem is that it is often not connected with the lives of people  (that link connects to research called Beyond Polar Bears) whose minds we are trying to change. People often do not connect solely to the environment – particularly environmental areas that are not close to them (and that they therefore do not engage with on a regular basis). Now, here, the use of koalas is better – people have real connections with koalas in Australia. But do you know what people have a better connection with? Humans.

 

The real way to connect people to the moral issue of climate change is to connect it with the real stories of real people. “I am a farmer” could have easily worked better than “I am koala”. “I am a tourist operator” could have worked better than “I am turtle”. “I am a person” could have worked better than “I am planet Earth”.

That does not mean that we have to take the environment out of our discussions, but rather that we just have to insert humans into it.

This campaign seems like a good step – taking us away from abstract science into real impacts. But we need to connect with people and the best way to do that is talk about the impacts on people.