Review of Climate Change Communication and Behavioural Intervention Strategies to Maximise Behavioural Impact
Addressing the climate change crisis requires far-reaching behavioural changes in regard to carbon-intensive lifestyles. But how to facilitate the required behavioural changes? What is the best way to communicate climate change such that behavioural change follows suit? And what types of behavioural interventions are the most effective to facilitate behavioural change?
Based on the state-of-the-art literature we reviewed, the short answer to these questions is: It is complicated. More to the point, there seems to be no golden standard, no one-size-fits-all solution, and no one type of intervention that works best across all people, behavioural domains, and contexts. Instead, as in other contexts of behaviour change communication such as health (obesity, COVID-19, addiction) or social inequality (e.g., sexism, ageism, racism), climate change communication (CCC) benefits from reflecting on the complexities inherent to all communication processes aiming at changing behaviours by tailoring messages in accordance with given audiences and the specific behaviours that need changing.
The circular graph above summarises our own approach to CCC (see Figure 1). In our main report, we start by discussing how climate change is an inherently abstract, novel, and psychologically distant phenomenon (see Section 2). We show that because of these attributes, communicating climate change to facilitate behaviour change faces multiple emotional, social and psychological barriers (see Section 3), in addition to behavioural barriers (see Section 4). Key barriers include social norms and political distance that perpetuate high-carbon attitudes and behaviours, biased risk perceptions failing to sense the urgency of the situation, low control perceptions discouraging action as well as missing emotional engagement as key motivators for taking action (see more in Section 5).
Climate change communication: A step-by-step decision guide
In our brief guide to climate change communication, we provide climate change communicators with a step-by-step decision chart to enable more effective, equitable, and fair climate change communication. The decision chart guides climate change communicators in public and non-public communication domains through an easy-to-follow series of yes-or-no questions which are designed such that the impact of the communication strategy is maximized in regard to choosing the best possible communication strategy currently available.
The above decision chart visualizes our approach for a more effective and equitable climate change communication within the broader context of individual behavioural change (see Figure below). We explain how to use our decision chart by walking the reader through exemplary cases and providing the rationale for each step. Each subsection is designed to comment on the “pre-design section” (i.e., aspects that need to be considered before the communication strategy can be designed) of the decision chart and is aimed at helping climate change communicators in their decision process.
By integrating questions around potential situational, structural, economic, and institutional barriers of behavior change in the pre-design phase we aim to make climate change communication more equitable and fair and thus more effective for a broader audience. This guide is conceptualized as a complementary add-on to our main report entitled “Review of Climate Change Communication and Behavioural Intervention Strategies to Maximise Behavioural Impact.”
