A new decade, the ‘roaring 20ies’, with a very visible and tangible climate crisis, is crying out for solutions on a global scale, currently exacerbated in a COVID-19-related economic, social and cultural crisis. Sustainability is the moral compass for individual, community as well as organizational and institutional action for a new, regenerative human-nature relationship. At the same time, the increase in communication about sustainability (public discourses), of sustainability (CSR, policies) and even for sustainability (NGOs, Fridays for Future) challenges media and communication studies dealing with the critical evaluation of the principle of growth as master frame in public discourses and the necessity to communicate inconvenient truths of de-growth and abandonment. This chapter introduces the main provocations and concepts for sustainability communication in the future and, in doing so, further establishes sustainability communication as emerging field with rather unspecific boundaries.
Sustainability communication is—as the
Sustainability Communication Reader
clearly shows—an emerging field and unifies a great variety of research approaches and practices. Even if it may be a little too soon to summarize the state of the rapidly changing and evolving debate about the potential and limitations of communicating about and for sustainability, we want to highlight some aspects in concluding—in relation to the academic debate as well as to possible contributions to societal challenges.
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