Hope: The Most Compelling Case for Change
We have climate action solutions at our fingertips. What is needed now is action – behavioral change at scale. So how can communicators drive that change? One answer is to give people hope.
Hope can sometimes seem in short supply these days – especially when it comes to the climate crisis. But it really doesn’t have to be that way: We know what we have to do to secure a liveable planet for future generations. Now it’s up to us to make the case for change.
At its heart, this is a battle over facts. And we are facing some formidable foes. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested billions in an army of lobbyists, advertising and PR agencies to use deceptive storytelling to deflect from climate action.
We must urgently fight back. As climate communicators, we can’t outspend the fossil fuel industry. But we can out-story them. We must redouble our efforts to make renewable energy more attractive and accessible in the eyes of the public and more resilient to backlash.
But how to do that at a time when overwhelmed audiences are switching off in their droves – partly due to pessimism about the future? That’s where Verified for Climate, an initiative from the UN Department of Global Communications and social impact agency Purpose, comes in.
Our campaigns, such as The Future Thanks You, put forward hopeful messages to dispel apathy without resorting to fear, guilt or shame. Instead of presenting the overwhelming challenges, we emphasize solutions, inviting people to envision a better future – one that is bright and possible.
“People want to be invested in a version of their own futures,” Jeremy Heimans co-founder and chairman of Purpose told our event at the UN’s SDG Media Zone. “And they don’t start with climate… they start with what they want as human beings, and they think about a much larger picture.”
Our focus on hope for the future is just one approach among many. Recently, Verified for Climate brought together a wide range of storytellers and leaders on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly to discuss the way forward and explore how best to build a powerful movement for transformative climate action.
Our discussions, held in New York on September 25 and 26, found much common ground, not least acknowledgement of the need to change tactics. Many had thought that once the climate crisis hit, people would irresistibly demand action from their leaders – but that hadn’t happened.
“The political system is not reacting,” renowned climate scientist Bill Hare of Climate Analytics told our Verified for Climate roundtable. “That’s a bit of a wake-up call to all of us … somehow what we are doing is not correct.”
Our conversation also saw widespread agreement that we need to highlight people on the climate change frontlines – both the victims and the innovators. One thread was the need to empower and raise the voices of those – especially in the Global South – who are already feeling the most severe impacts of climate change but who have contributed the least to the problem.
“Start resourcing local community groups to be able to do their own storytelling and to start telling stories from the ground up so we can have more impact on climate action,” said Makeeba Browne, Chief of Equity, Justice, and Culture at ClimateWorks Foundation.
Celebrating and harnessing creative solutions in impacted communities will be key to this strategy, speakers agreed. Stories told by communities in their own way resonate more widely on a personal, emotional and cultural level – a tactic bad actors have become adept at exploiting.
Acknowledging this emotional appeal is also vital to better understand why fearful audiences are drawn to conspiracies that blame climate action for all societal ills, said Jennie King, Director of Climate Disinformation Research and Policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“We have to change our strategies, we have to work out how to make inroads into those communities, and how to do convincing forms of messaging that are going to reach those people,” she told the roundtable in what was a rousing call to action.
Above all, our events underlined the great strength found in collaboration. That’s why, in the run up to COP29 and beyond, Verified for Climate will continue to spread hope while building a broad coalition of voices. Together, we can win the climate story. We hope you’ll join us.