From peer-to-peer interactions to global media and how both can work together to create rooted and resilient networks of meaning, a sustained level of science-based awareness

and engagement on climate change. First, I'll explain how to translate climate science to the public. Second, I'll describe how connecting with people as individuals to their identities, values, and worldviews can help them care more about climate change. Third, I'll identify narratives with global appeal.

Finally, I'll explore how you can combine multiple climate talking points to greater effect. What this work uncovers is that a deeper ecological, ideological shift is necessary to live sustainably and ensuring we do for generations to come. We all have to work together to write the story of how we get better.

In this way, the story becomes a metaphorical forest made up of emergent, evolving, dying, repurposed, and ultimately connected and neutrally reinforcing climate change narratives. The IPCC report says limiting global warming to 1.5 Celsius will require rapid,

far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society. The required speed, scale, and granularity of these changes can be intimidating. The good news is climate science has already revealed many helpful actions we can take. Tree planting, keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and transitioning to renewables like solar and wind,

as well as transforming how we grow our food and what we eat, for example, by increasing gardening and veganism in cities, and radically decreasing consumption, are just some of the many ways we can lower greenhouse gas emissions and CO2, biodiversity loss, and climate change. So what's stopping us?

When the IPCC report calls for changes in all aspects of society, this implies that successful climate change mitigation and adaptation will require the efforts of all aspects of society. As we increasingly experience the felt effects of climate change, like hotter summers and wilder winters, climate change is increasingly becoming a concern to the public,

shaping voting patterns, consumer behaviors, careers, and more. But it hasn't always been this way. Climate change is already hard to communicate because it's been relatively invisible to people. We also haven't been able to communicate climate science in a way that people understand and that motivates them to change.

Despite waves of environmental movements, climate change remained a relatively economically, politically, and socially marginalized issue until quite recently, and didn't gather the diverse skill sets needed to secure sufficient political and public buy-in. For this reason, climate scientists nobly rose to the challenge of also communicating the science.

However, communications is its own science, and to do it well also necessitates a lot of training, experience, domain knowledge, and specialization. And informing and motivating people to act on climate is difficult enough without well-funded disinformation campaigns and lobbying by the fossil fuel industry. Climate communications is therefore a relatively new career path,

full of uncertainty and a need to experiment, feed on errors, learn quickly, and iterate on the work. The benefit of such a context is it hasn't inherited a legacy of dominant, dogmatic, in-principle assertions endemic to some other disciplines, which reveal problematic idealizations of our cognitive power.

For now, it exists more in practice. Focusing on practice offers a chance to correctly position knowledge as cumulative and up for revision, an honest reckoning with human cognitive limitations and possibilities. First, there are a few guidelines for communicating climate science

that have been found to work well. Communicate using plain language, be concise, and get to the point quickly. Repeat the same messages, connect felt effects to climate science, stay positive, use trusted messengers, communicate using memorable stories, use visuals, humor, and other creative forms of engagement, and encourage dialogue.

When scientists talk about climate models, people can get lost in the details. That's why it's advised to anchor communications in the core facts. You might say, global warming is an increase in the Earth's temperature, which changes climate patterns. Warming happens when heat-trapping gases are released into the atmosphere,

for example, by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas for energy. We're seeing the impacts now in more frequent and severe heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods. 25 years ago, Susan Joy Hassell was working with climate scientists on translating their findings to the general public when no one else was.

Hassell says scientists use words the public uses, but to mean different things. For example, scientists often use the term positive feedback, which the public might associate to receiving positive feedback on a job well done. However, scientists use this to describe a vicious cycle in the climate system,

whereby warming causes even more warming. Hassell says there's about 150 words and expressions that create differences between the science and how it's perceived by the public. Climate communications research also finds that certain words and concepts have negative associations and can make people more resistant to proposed solutions,

especially if they're associated with politics they don't agree with. Some examples are regulate, restrict, cut, control, and tax. What alternate words and concepts can we use then? Some climate communicators suggest using words like entrepreneurship,

free market, and competition because they're well received by the public. But this example reveals the largest challenge climate communicators face today. How can we motivate people using words they connect with, but with also challenging the status quo? That is the extractivism, competition, and consumerism driving climate change.

How do we inspire new and necessary sustainable ways of being? If you pander to comfort zones, nothing changes. If you present something alienating, people dig their heels in and nothing changes. In this line of work, these mystics can literally feel like the end of the world,

but they will and must happen. As I mentioned earlier, this discipline is new, and there are no silver bullet communication strategies. There's only humility, learning by doing, near constant iteration, and humble successes for now. But we're not totally in the dark. There's evidence supporting the idea that messages resonate more with people

when they connect to them personally, to their identities, values, worldviews, et cetera. Among climate communicators, this approach is recognized as particularly effective. Interestingly, however, most of our engagement activities are still tailored towards the general public.

The reason could be that approaching climate communications with this level of granularity at scale is an intimidating task, but some organizations are trying it. Climate outreach is one such organization. It specializes in how to engage hard-to-reach audiences, developing climate connection programs with communities such as youth,

center-rate, faith, and migrant groups. There are some general guidelines for connecting to individuals that have been found to work well. Understand what the audience knows and doesn't know. Identify their identity, values, worldviews, beliefs, attitudes, et cetera. Connect with what matters to them. Use a shared language.

Use trusted messengers. Frame climate change as personally relevant and provide tangible examples. Help them realize what they can do and key actions they can take. Climate outreach says there are different ways to understand your audience so you can tailor your messaging. For example, surveys, focus groups, and stakeholder engagement.

Additionally, testing strategies, narratives, and communications materials with a sample of your target audience helps gauge reactions and avoid backlash. Climate outreach's global narratives approach is the first initiative to develop communications methodology to build capacity in specific locations,

to train local organizations in testing and developing effective climate communications. The global south has been particularly neglected in this regard, with most climate narratives appearing in global media appealing to the global north, as well as to people who have already been engaged in climate.

Climate outreach's global narratives workshop leads participants through a series of questions. What do you care about? What do you dislike? What makes you proud of who you are? How do you feel about your country and your place in it? What changes have you noticed and what concerns do you have about the future? What does it mean to you and what do you think causes it?

What are the impacts and how will you and others cope? What do renewables mean to you and how can they replace fossil fuels? After these conversations, short prepared narratives are handed out to participants along with red and green highlighters. One by one, the facilitator reads out the narrative to the group

and asks them to read it themselves and highlight any words or passages they feel strongly positive about in green and strongly negative about in red. When the group discusses what they highlighted and why, then the group discusses what they highlighted and why. Later, the marked narratives are analyzed alongside transcripts from the discussions

in order to generate recommendations on what messaging to use and what to avoid. Finding that images of polar bears, melting ice caps, and smoking chimneys were relatively ineffective at connecting with people, climate outreach realized that developing a captivating, diverse, and people-focused visual language was necessary.

They developed the climate visuals website to support journalists, researchers, campaigners, photographers, and filmmakers in telling powerful new visual stories with local flavor. Climate communications professionals can also be strategic about the groups they engage. For example, with over 80% of the world's population identifying as belonging to a religion

and with houses of worship existing nearly everywhere, it would be wise to consider how climate justice could be relevant to these communities. The following is an example of how two different people, an atheist and a Christian, may be motivated towards the same climate action.

A science-loving atheist may support protecting forests because forests remove CO2 from the air, while a devout Christian may care about protecting forests because of the belief that one must conserve God's creation. The vast majority of Europeans are very extremely worried to somewhat worried about climate change.

Yet many people don't talk about climate change often or even ever in their daily lives. In America, 60% of people say they rarely to never discuss it with their family or friends. We've seen using trusted messengers recommended a few times now. Arguably, the most powerful incarnation of this is peer-to-peer communication,

talking to partners, friends, and family members about climate change. Climate Outreach's hashtag Talking Climate Handbook, supported by UAT Climate Kick, was designed to help people have conversations about climate change in their daily lives. The Talking Climate Handbook suggests you use real talk in these conversations.

Respect your conversational partner and find common ground. Enjoy the conversation. Ask questions. Listen and show you've heard. Tell your story. Action makes it easier, but doesn't fix it. Learn from the conversation. And keep going and keep connected.

These seem like obvious recommendations, but what they really are are ways to ensure you maintain a good faith conversation. Once good faith is lost, a conversation on climate change may have the opposite of your intended effect, pushing your conversational partner further into skepticism or denial. Nothing that we do, no matter how brilliant, how technologically innovative,

can reach the traction and impact that we need it to be, unless we begin to very rapidly scale up our insights and capacities for understanding the psychological dimension of climate change. Renée Lertzman, psychologist. UAT Climate Kick offers a free online course, Engaging People on Climate Change.

It was co-created with Dr. Renée Lertzman, who has focused on psychology and climate change for a few decades now. The course identifies ways people can find climate change information at a psychological level and how climate communicators might help them move past their defense mechanisms.

People's powerful response to climate change can interfere with their ability to take action. When presented with challenging information that clashes with who they are and what they care about, people can have feelings like guilt, shame, and powerlessness. Such feelings can trigger internal conflict, like cognitive dissonance

and defense mechanisms, including denial, disavowal, and rationalizing. Traditional communications approaches like educating, cheerleading, enticing, nudging, fear, and the writing reflex, that is, the strong urge to tell people the solution to their problem because we feel we know it would work,

can be counterproductive. They can trigger defense mechanisms. By understanding the psychology of people's reactions to climate change, we can start to imagine ways to get through to them. Instead of pounding away with the same impersonal arguments, we need to have conversations that take a human or society-centered approach.

This could entail, for example, making a reflection or summary of what your conversational partner is saying, emphasizing whatever change talk you've heard, and asking for clarification, thereby avoiding the writing reflex. The goal is to have your conversational partner fit climate action into their life in a way that makes sense for them, not for you to do it for them.

We've explored bottom-up, individualized climate communications, and learned this requires quite a bit of resources like research, the construction of multiple narratives, and people on the ground willing to engage their peers. For this reason, possible top-down approaches,

with the potential of more for less, become incredibly tantalizing. So are there any? As we gather more data on what connects the different identities, values, and worldviews, some common themes emerge. I call these narratives with mass resonance. They are intergenerational responsibility, public health, and prosperity.

Climate change legal actions have been attempted since the 90s. These cases typically involve youth and children as they represent the class most affected by government action or inaction.

However, such cases have generally been dismissed. In August 2018, at age 15, Greta Thunberg started spending her school days outside the Swedish parliament to call for stronger action on climate change by holding up a sign reading, school strike for climate. By 2019, there were multiple coordinated city protests happening around the globe,

each involving over a million people, mostly students. Her impact on the world stage has been described as the Greta effect. Greta's main talking point is that climate change will have a disproportionate effect on young people and that their futures are being stolen. This involves the concept of earth overshoot.

That is, adults are consuming so excessively, they're using up the earth's resources, like fresh water, forests, fish stocks, et cetera, beyond their ability to regenerate and provide for future generations. It's difficult to quantify the effectiveness of the Greta effect. Motivating millions upon millions of people to engage in political activism

for the environment does spread awareness of climate science, generate a critical mass of public engagement for politicians to see, and has undeniably helped normalize climate change as a topic in the public discourse. In June 2019, a YouGov poll in Britain found that public concern about the environment had reached record levels in the UK since Thunberg and Extension Rebellion

have, quote, pierced the bubble of denial. In February 2019, Thunberg shared a stage with the then President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, where he claimed, in the next financial period from 2021 to 2027,

every fourth euro spent within the EU budget will go towards action to mitigate climate change. Climate change has also played a significant role in the European Parliament elections in May 2019, as Green parties recorded their best ever result, increasing their MEP seat numbers from 52 to 72.

Many of the gains came from Northern European countries, where young people have taken to the streets during Fridays for Future. In July 2019, inspired by Thunberg, wealthy philanthropists and investors from the US donated about $600,000 to support Extinction Rebellion and school strike groups to establish the Climate Emergency Fund.

Trevor Nielsen, one of the philanthropists, said the three founders would be contacting friends among the global mega rich to donate, quote, 100 times more in the weeks and months ahead. Recently, and perhaps relatively relatedly, Jeff Bezos pledged to create a $10 billion Earth Fund.

However, activists are justifiably skeptical about the mega rich's commitment to effectively dismantling the high carbon economic system they built their wealth upon. Thunberg can also be credited with accelerating the anti-flying movement by promoting train travel instead. The buzzword associated with this movement is flight shame.

It's a phenomenon in which free people feel social pressure not to fly because of associated emissions and climate change. For example, traveling from London to Amsterdam by train instead of plane cuts CO2 emissions by 83%. Sweden reported a 4% drop in domestic air travel for 2019 and an increase in rail,

and the number of people flying between German cities fell 12% in November from a year earlier. Meanwhile, Deutsche Bahn has reported record passenger numbers. In September, Germany's parliament voted in a climate package, including a tax cut aimed at reducing train ticket prices by around 10%,

while Deutsche Bahn is planning for all their intercity trains to run on renewables. And yet, we're beginning to see how these larger narratives are less resilient than peer-to-peer communications and are particularly vulnerable to being co-opted. Recently, a 19-year-old German vlogger dubbed the anti-Greta,

Naomi Seibt, was promoted heavily by leading figures on the far right. Her mother, a lawyer, has represented politicians from the Alternative Vod Deutschland I.F. Day party in court. Seibt has been quoted as saying, climate change alarmism is at its very core a despicably anti-human ideology.

She's being paid by the Heartland Institute, a think tank closely allied with the White House, to make climate denial videos. One could argue that, once a narrative, movement, etc. becomes large enough, it's vulnerable to being co-opted. The key is to ensure one is always generating and framing the discourse

and is never in a reactive position, instead pushing into the ever new and ever exciting edge of the Overton window and drawing the public along. This is, of course, no easy task. Economic, political, and social realities help determine which of these influencers or child gods will be favored.

People who are insecure, lacking access to education and Medicare, for example, and who live in societies with greater wealth disparity, for example, in the U.S., are more likely to support strongman figures playing to their defense mechanisms, whereas those who are secure are inclined to support figures advocating for courage, collectivism, and action.

Climate change is a public health crisis. The frequency, intensity, and duration of heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods, and storms are increasing. As average temperatures rise,

so will heat-related disorders. Air pollution and, relatedly, respiratory illness can worsen. High CO2 concentrations are associated with decreased mental performance. Climate change increases the transmission of certain diseases, creates food insecurity, causes mass migration, and most likely increased violence,

and threatens our mental health and well-being, eco-anxiety. As we explored earlier, fear narratives, like focusing only on climate change's many adverse health effects, can trigger defense mechanisms. This is why the topic of public health must be handled carefully, and even cleverly.

We may look to a few historical examples of moments when a public health crisis fueled by environmental abuse mobilized political action. In 1952, a thick layer of smog settled over London, England. This severe air pollution event was caused by the city's excessive use of coal and lasted five days.

It's estimated up to 12,000 people died, and 100,000 were made ill. Environmental legislation since the Great Smog of London, such as the City of London Act 1954 and the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 68, introduced measures to address air pollution,

like the mandated movement towards smokeless fuels. Financial incentives were offered to households to replace open coal fires with alternatives, such as gas fires. Some talking points used to gather support for such measures were the social and economic costs of air pollution, and that clean air was as important as clean water.

This is clever messaging because it normalizes clean air by comparing it to clean water, which was already viewed favorably and had been successfully fought for in the previous century. Why had it been fought for? Well, before the Great Smog of 1952, there was the Great Stink of 1858.

The Great Stink happened when hot weather brought out the smell of human and industrial waste present on the banks of the River Thames. This waste was also linked to the transmission of cholera. It's here we see a great example of environmental action through satire, with many cartoons of the day highlighting the unacceptable state of things

and mocking government in action. The Silent Highwayman. Death rose on the Thames, claiming the lives of victims who have not paid to have the river cleaned up. The monster soup commonly called Thames water. A drop of Thames water.

The figure of dirty Father Thames features prominently in these political illustrations. Filthy river, filthy river, fall from London to the nor, what art thou but one vast gutter, one tremendous common shore. London's first major cholera epidemic struck in 1831

and claimed 6,536 victims. In 1848 to 49, there was a second outbreak and 14,137 Londoners died. This was followed by a third one in 1853 to 54, in which 10,738 people died.

Following the Great Stink of London, government authorities accepted a proposal for an integrated and fully functioning sewer system from the civil engineer Joseph Bezelgeth. This marked the beginning of London's sewage reform. During the 1970s and 80s, the ozone hole was identified by scientists,

which was linked to the increase in skin cancer. The hole was caused by the use of manufactured chemicals. An international treaty to phase out a number of these chemicals, the Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer, was agreed to on the 26th of August, 1987, and entered into force exactly two years later.

With the parties to the protocol having phased out, 98% of their ozone depleting substances, they saved an estimated two million people from skin cancer every year. Why was the protocol so successful? It's speculated it's because much of the negotiation was held in small informal groups,

and this enabled a genuine exchange of views and created trust. The people negotiating the treaty also included scientists, which lent credibility. We must also note that the ozone damaging chemical industry didn't have the lobbying power fossil fuel companies have today.

While governments declared climate emergencies and merely philosophized about what an actual emergency response to climate change could look like, the coronavirus pandemic propelled countries globally into economic, political, and social measures, including shutting down the economy, that is, closing shops, cafes, restaurants, et cetera, as well as borders.

These measures could certainly be described as anything but business as usual, and as reflecting an emergency taken seriously. While these responses have been imperfect, and there is much to criticize, it's worth wondering why this pandemic has mobilized action in a way climate change hasn't. As we explored earlier,

some reasons are that climate change is relatively slower to show its impacts, and it's larger in scope, and therefore requires a multi-solutions approach. And this represents a heavier cognitive load, i.e. it's not solved by a silver bullet technology like the vaccine. Plus, years of corporate lobbying

has spread disinformation and slowed action. Moreover, coronavirus feels personal. That's because it's spread person to person and invades the body. Could a greater narrative emphasis on the body, such as the presence of microplastics in our digestive tracts or pollution in our lungs, spur more climate action?

Images of nurses with mass creased faces, red and bleeding skin, have invaded our social networks accompanied by the hashtag stay home. This invokes wartime propaganda, asking people to do their part and glorifying sacrifice. We will see the same messaging if the climate crisis worsens. It's essential we counter these messages

that distract from government accountability and which positions avoidable suffering as acceptable. Key to this is creating alliances between essential workers, medical professionals, educators, grocery store clerks, et cetera, and activists. Both COVID-19 and climate change

feature famous exponential growth charts. Yet we know this cannot be. As was the case with the Spanish flu, flu curves are necessarily flattened if the virus spreads through the population, infecting and killing people until herd immunity is achieved. Climate change and its knock-on effects also have the potential to kill off populations

to such an extent that exceeding planetary boundaries through consumption habits no longer occurs. Over the years, the eco-fascist idea that civilization is fundamentally in conflict with the environment and massusianism, which advocates for population control as a means to avert resource insecurity, have seeped into the public imagination.

In addition to this, despair, resignation, and fatalism stemming from eco-anxiety have made climate collapse accepted as possible, if not probable. The coronavirus, on the other hand, carries no such baggage. However, we again see how these large narratives of courage, collectivism, and action can be countered with defense mechanism

and individualism and inaction. Anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists are coming out hard against the development of a coronavirus vaccine, linking it to, of all things, 5G communications networks. In the US, the epicenter of the anti-vaccination movement is the Children's Health Defense. CHD has spread the rumor

that the COVID-19 lockdown is being used opportunistically for the installation of 5G masks. They also ran a piece suggesting the pandemic provides cover for a sinister, quote, global agenda, trying to make us all, quote, subjects of a techno-communist global movement, a stance redolent of the major eco-fascist figure,

Ted consistency, also known as the uni bopper. As leading health experts have affirmed, the climate crisis is a threat multiplier, particularly for communities suffering from environmental injustice.

And climate change isn't a future risk. The impacts are occurring now. With a growing aging population and no climate action, these impacts will get considerably worse. For example, heat-related deaths in the UK are projected to increase by about two and a half times to over 7,000 by the 2050s.

The barriers to addressing the public health crisis that is climate change are primarily sociopolitical, rather than economic or technical. Crucially, the sooner mitigative strategies are implemented, the sooner nations can avoid massive costs in healthcare and emergency relief.

Some prosperity narratives focus on how climate action can raise resource efficiency and stimulate innovation and new investment in infrastructure to improve the economy. However, as we've explored, our current economic system, which aims for infinite growth, is a major driver of climate change.

It's therefore necessary we re-conceptualize prosperity. Prosperity not as an ever-increasing GDP, but as financial sustainability and meeting not exceeding one's needs. Importantly, this will involve narratives that challenge consumerism and the myth of green growth, and relatedly, the concept of decoupling.

Relative decoupling refers to a decline in the ecological intensity per unit of economic output. In this situation, resource impacts decline relative to the GDP, which could itself still be rising. In other words, total material throughput and emissions can continue to rise. Absolute decoupling

refers to a situation in which resource impacts decline in absolute terms. Sufficient absolute decoupling remains unproven, and when we're running out of time, we can't afford to make decisions based on wishful thinking. We know what works now. Prosperity doesn't only have to have material associations.

It can refer to experiences that help us thrive physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Walking through a forest, access to a community of people we care about, exercise, and growing a garden are all experiences with low planetary impact. We can even co-opt economic language for our purposes

and refer to, for example, leading an enriched life as a sustainable lifestyle. Growthism is anti-intellectual in the sense that it prevents us from thinking about what we actually want the economy and our society to achieve. GDP comes in to stand for thought itself.

Jason Hickel, economic anthropologist. One environmental movement that focuses on reimagining prosperity is degrowth. Degrowth emphasizes the need to reduce production and consumption in the global north and advocates for a socially just and sustainable society with well-being as an indicator of prosperity

instead of GDP. Well-being can include, for example, life expectancy and self-reported life satisfaction and happiness. The movement relies heavily on economic data to support its claims. For example, indicators of well-being are higher the more equitable society is.

In other words, people are happier in societies where wealth disparity is small. What we find is well-being isn't exclusively coupled with GDP growth. Not to mention, climate change, as it's linked to GDP growth, would certainly negatively impact people's well-being. The real power of GDP growth

as a metric and narrative is that it's just enough to convince people that the system is working who would otherwise be quite aware that it's not. 28% of all new income from global GDP growth over the past 40 years have gone to the richest 1%, all millionaires. In other words, nearly one-third of our labor,

resource extraction, and CO2 emissions have been done to make rich people richer. Hickel also makes the point that in psychology, the capacity for self-restraint in the face of excess is considered to be a mark of maturity, empathy, and wisdom. And yet, applying this principle to consumption is considered unthinkable.

These degrowth narratives both challenge the economic growth paradigm and offer a new vision of prosperity that centers humans and the environment. Intergenerational responsibility, public health, and prosperity narratives can be combined to create a holistic approach to climate storytelling. Since each of these topics

benefit from climate change mitigation and adaptation, communications professionals can lead with the climate or with the co-benefit. Here are some examples. We have a responsibility to solve climate change to make sure everyone, especially our children, can lead healthy and prosperous lives.

We can reduce death, illness, and the financial costs from climate change if we prioritize our children, public health, and prosperity. Ideally, over time, climate action and its co-benefits merge so thoroughly that they become one and the same. Narrative Economics is a book by Robert Shiller

that references many historical moments of crisis and related transformative narratives which either contributed to or helped mitigate those crises. Might some of these kinds of narratives be applied to climate change? For example, the price increase of commodities between the end of World War I and 1920 was widely blamed on businesspeople

who were labeled with the word profiteer. Could the narrative figure profiteer be applied to big corporates and governments who benefit off the backs of the environment, public health, and our children's futures? We have seen a taste of this with the popular 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emissions

talking point. However, this failed to mobilize adequate action. The reason, perhaps, is these companies largely provide energy to consumers, keeping their homes warm and their car tanks full so people couldn't wholly distance themselves from culpability and assume a moral high ground.

Again, we encounter the power of trusted messengers with Shiller advocating for politicians and policymakers to take a more active role in narrative engineering, such as dispelling misinformation and fostering desired economic behavior. Of course, this would only be relevant to governments

that support climate action. Christopher Booker argues there are only a few basic storylines, overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest voyage in return, and combating tragedy and rebirth. At the core of these examples are stories of various kinds of transformation through confrontation, social, economic,

spatial, and personal. Could fitting the climate issue into these familiar plots help connect it to people? Could the monster we need to overcome be climate change? Or perhaps, corrupt elites like fossil-fuel CEOs and clean governments who have profited the climate experts

at our expense? How might we tell a rags to riches story that rejects our current conception of prosperity, one in which we become truly prosperous as healthy individuals living in accordance with the environment and satisfied with our needs simply being met? How about a homecoming story? We build a closer relationship to the environment and in this way,

returning to ourselves as part of it. There are a few aesthetic and literary movements associated with positive climate action, like Afrofuturism. Another that's gaining popularity is the topic of today, which is solarpunk. Solarpunk creators imagine what a sustainable world could look like

and how we can get there. Solarpunk typically features art nouveau motifs, heavily green cityscapes, diversity, and community, and of course, solar and wind power. But solarpunk is still quite niche. There's much work that needs to be done here. We've just thoroughly explored climate change communications,

its history, the status quo, and potential experiments in storytelling. We learned that our ever-evolving understanding of climate science should be at the core of our communications, and that a good faith, one-on-one conversation is the most resilient but small-scale form of engagement on climate change. And narratives relating to intergenerational responsibility,

public health, and a reimagined concept of prosperity are particularly effective at inspiring large audiences towards action, yet are less resilient and especially vulnerable to being co-opted. These micro and macro climate communications work together, offering an entry point for lasting change,

a deeper confrontation with and transformation of our relationship to the environment, each other, and ourselves. Informed by climate science and ecology, what's common to all these narratives is a different way of being in the world, a rejection of the dominant Hobbesian idea that humankind is fundamentally insecure and adversarial.

The truth is, we have the capacity for both selfishness and generosity, and we can make choices about how to be and what will enable us to collectively survive. Indeed, climate change may be the worst story ever, but it's not a terribly new one. The first human adaptation known to us as foraging. As tribes realized

the importance of food security and strength in numbers for their survival, they developed stories to reinforce supporting behaviors. These stories mourn of antisocial behaviors like deception, stinginess, and theft, which could put groups at risk of food stress. This is famously embodied in the mythological trickster figures. Sound familiar?

As we take a closer look at the environment, its interdependencies, tensions, temporalities, processes, et cetera, may become familiar to us. But nature isn't a self-regulating system, and there's much we cannot perceive or measure. Once we let go of the idea that the environment is totally balanced, calculable, and controllable,

and that humans must infinitely dominate whatever's around them, we can begin to understand nature as a humble approximation. We can slow down and think beyond ourselves. Only then can we truly integrate sustainable behaviors into our lives, becoming better stewards, collaborators, and observers of the many people

and organisms we encounter. We will have written a story worth living for. Yeah, with him. Thanks, Christine. It's really nice to hear an updated iteration of this talk again. We've had some questions in the Slido.

Eugenio, do you want to pick one out? Sure. There's one that is saying, what is the organization you've mentioned in this Global Narratives Approach slide? That is an organization called Climate Outreach.

Cool. You can find them on Twitter, but their website's really excellent, and it's full of tons of case studies and reports. A lot of good stuff there.

Awesome. And then there is another one saying, yeah, first the funny one. What comic book are the pictures from? I'm also curious about it. These are from multiple different comic books, but they're all the work of an artist called Mothias, who's also Jean Girard, I believe,

his physical name is running. He's a really excellent artist that does a lot of work that really, I feel, fits the SolarPanc aesthetic, because there's a lot of very, you know, there's a lot of pastel colors, there's a lot of images of community and nature,

focused imagery as well. Yeah, and this was like the individual recruited by Yordoski's for Dune, who did all the storyboarding. I was hoping you were going to mention that. Yeah, he has a really great profile, so definitely check him out. He's part of the Bondi movement.

Then in your experience, when trying to convince politicians, what is the most effective approach to make them understand that climate change needs to be fought? Yeah, it really depends on the politician.

So yeah, but ultimately, more generally, what, you know, of course, politicians are motivated by retaining their job and seeing relevant, right? So a lot of it is actually, I think things like citizen lobbying can be really powerful, and just ensuring that,

like, you know, showing up, that your voice is heard, and that this is the direction a city wants to go in. And you know, also creating things like citizen assembly, this could be a really powerful thing. Basically, really heavily communicating

that this is an action that everyone in the city wants to take. It benefits people in the city. And I think it helps for politicians to have really tangible actions, you know? So if you're a lobbying group, it's really helpful to have a specific goal, and that goal might be

getting the government to divest from fossil fuels, or getting even just pensions, like here in Germany, there's a great group called Fossil Free Berlin, that their specific mandate for last year, I believe, was to try to lobby the government to ensure that no fossil fuels were in government pensions.

So I think these specific goals can be really helpful. But yeah, definitely politicians is a tough one, and I think that's where citizen engagement can be really powerful. Like working within government or alongside government, yeah, I mean, it's a lot of, I think also offering

a compelling roadmap, like something really tangible, a plan helps them, because I think a lot of times these individuals, you know, especially national governments, like they signed the Paris Agreement, and then they have to take care of like literally every other topic. So what's helpful about an organization like mine or other organizations too, is that you can connect governments

with the different policy innovations, technologies, et cetera, that are out there to get them like up to speed on what's changing. But yeah, it really depends on the government. Obviously there's some very conservative governments. It also depends on the country and what their current like economic reality is.

You know, like countries like Poland, even Germany, there's like some heavy industry countries that are going to need a lot more like hand-holding through the process, because they have, and like heavy industry workers to take care of. So we call that the just transition angle, which is just to ensure

that these individuals aren't left behind and that their jobs can be transitioned to renewables, for example, and basically like, yeah, like to avoid civil backlash as well, you know, because we might be sold on solar pump, we might be sold on climate change mitigation adaptation, but there's a lot of actual citizens

who feel, you know, their their livelihoods threatened. By the green transition, and that's really valid and they need to be heard as well. So yeah, it's just to say, there's not like a clear, unfortunately, not a very easy way to answer the question, but I hope that at least like painted out a bit of a landscape.

Yeah, yeah. Those are tough ones. Yeah, it's a tough one. Yeah, it's a tough one. Yeah, great point if I may, to know Christine. So in the Trust Discord, we have a reading group that goes through various topics and we've discussed the climate in the Climate Channel. Most recently, we discussed an article about the impossibility

of building coherent narratives around this kind of complex mess of inter-tangled happenings and goings on that is climate change. And obviously, you're trying to address this by, you know, weaving these narratives in different ways. But this article we were reading

suggested this is like a fruitless or a hopeless endeavor. So I'm just really interested to hear about some of your lived experiences and your challenges in bringing these new narratives and new ways of telling the stories. Have you had notable successes? Have there been times when these approaches

have fallen short? You're really interested to hear your experiences. Yeah, I mean, I just think overall, I mean, I think that the point of entry is dialogue, right? This is how we shift the overtone of like what's in the realm of acceptable public discourse. So talking about it is really the first step.

And I think that's like undeniably valuable, you know, like we've seen the change, we've seen the change from just the last few years. And that can be accounted, that can be credited a little bit due to the increasing felt effects of climate change. But I really think there's a huge movement happening now,

which you see with Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion. And a lot more people are talking and thinking about climate change when they haven't before. So that's like very tangible, clear change. And there's more, like I mentioned in the talk, there's more in certain areas like green parties being elected.

So I'm like, I try to remain somewhat optimistic about it. But yeah, as far as these like applicable narratives, I mean, I think climate outreach has a lot of data on their work because it's probably better referenced than my organization because they deal exclusively with climate change communications.

So I think what they have is probably more like relevant to people listening to the talk and interested in like seeing those reports and how like public perception is changing. So I definitely invite you all to see to visit climate outreach. They do great stuff. But yeah, I would argue against that. I mean, I just think, yeah, it's like a really big daunting problem.

But I guess I get that's a bit explored in the talk. Like obviously you need to have different narratives for different places. But yeah, I think they're like what can tie all these things together. Like are these big narratives of mass resonance, like public health, you know, intergenerational responsibility,

prosperity. Those are things that matter to literally everyone like across like physical borders, cultural boundaries, so I would say those are good, good entry points for yeah, for any storytelling you're doing, you know, like but also,

if you're, depends the context also like because you mentioned the climate storytelling, but it's like is that micro scale, macro scale? Are you talking about like literature, like creative work or climate reporting? You know what I mean? Like there's, it's going to be different. But I think, I think to say like, oh, because it needs to be targeted,

like then it's an impossible task or something, I think that's wrong. I just think we need to work harder, that's all. And we need more people on board. Like I mentioned in the beginning of the talk, it was like kind of an impoverished movement for a long time. It was a lot of like, yeah, like citizens engaged and then also like climate scientists, but then there's huge,

there are huge gaps in skill sets. Like that's why it's interesting to see solar punk capture, you know, not necessarily capture the public's imagination, but some subcultures imagination. I think that's, that's what needs to happen. Like the movement just didn't have, didn't have climate communicators for a long time, didn't have artists on board,

didn't have, you know, developers, like all these different skill sets. It's like really quite recent that people are pushing into the green sector and saying like, actually, you know, I want to work work on this topic. So I think it's so new in a way.

no, we're definitely going to see change. You know, maybe there's this mix between like this top-down, institutional driven stuff coming from policy side, like where you're working, Christine, EIT and so on. And solar punk is this more kind of grassroots emergent movement. I think we're getting

some people that want, I'm looking at the chat, I don't want to like, you're too long. we take the time. We wind. It's our channel. If you want to see other talks, they should go somewhere. I think the next guy is kind of a loser anyway. Yeah, before we move to, to what seem,

yeah, let's be excellent to each other. Thank you, Christine. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's really nice and also very aesthetically pleasing. I would say like the, so before we move to the next talk, with our live guest here, like live remote guests. people are very curious to know

if that's your, really your house on Twitter or it's, or it's not. Christine, can you answer that? Behind me? It might be directed towards someone else, but like, you possibly have the different background. We have a different background

for a while. This is without analysis and support by the proletarian masses, climate communicators is just liberal Instagram influencing. Let me see. without class analysis and support by it. Yeah, I mean, I like to believe that like my, in the talk, it was, you know, I talked about this

intersectional approach. Like, yeah, I mean, I think we were talking a bit earlier about what is cyberpunk, what is solar punk or what is punk. I think punk is actually really centered around like class struggle for one thing. But I think what's, what's great about solar punk is it goes beyond that. And it's quite feminist. It's quite focused on like racial,

like ethnic diversity as well, which I think is really important for the movement. And obviously, yeah, like the current economic system is incredibly harmful towards individuals, you know, like as explored in the deep roast section, but also for the planet.

And externalities are like inherently, like to, to like change the financial system and include externalities. That's absolutely like a decolonial feminist struggle. So let's be clear about that. Climate communicators to do their work effectively absolutely need to anchor

their work in these realities. And I think there's some really amazing people doing this. There's a woman, Mary Helgar, who I invite everyone to follow on Twitter, who in particular, focus on climate actions through the decolonial lens. So yeah,

excellent climate communicators out there doing the work right now through that lens. And yeah, I invite you all to check her out. Yeah, Mary, at Mary Hegler.