Reorienting Climate Change Communication for Effective Mitigation

Abstract

Climate communication approaches expend significant resources promoting attitudinal change, but research suggests that encouraging attitudinal change alone is unlikely to be effective. The link between an individual's attitudes and subsequent behavior is mediated by other influences, such as social norms and the “free-rider” effect. One way to engender mitigative behaviors would be to introduce regulation that forces green behavior, but government fears a resulting loss of precious political capital. Conversely, communication approaches that advocate individual, voluntary action ignore the social and structural impediments to behavior change. The authors argue that there are two crucial, but distinct, roles that communication could play in engaging the public in low carbon lifestyles: first, to facilitate public acceptance of regulation and second, to stimulate grass-roots action through affective and rational engagement with climate change. The authors also argue that using communication to stimulate demand for regulation may reconcile these “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches.

From Carbon Markets to Carbon Morality: Creative Compounds as Framing Devices in Online Discourses on Climate Change Mitigation

“…Communicators have been grappling with the idea of how to put the issue of global warming onto the public agenda (Ockwell et al, 2009), calling for in-depth communication research to tailor messages to the existing attitudes, values, and perceptions of different audiences (Nisbet, 2009; reference after review). According to the sociologist Sheldon Ungar:…”

“…Communicating climate change is a complex activity in which many different stakeholders engage for a variety purposes and in order to achieve various results (Nerlich & Koteyko, 2009). Apart from advice on how to reduce one's carbon footprint on individual, regional, national and global levels, advice is also proliferating on how to communicate climate change (e.g., Moser & Dilling, 2007;Ockwell et al, 2009).…”

Which efficacy constructs for large-scale social dilemma problems? Individual and collective forms of efficacy and outcome expectancies in the context of climate change mitigation

“…Despite the acknowledged need for immediate action and government calculations that energy consumption by private individuals accounts for 51% of the total energy use of the UK (Hillman and Fawcett, 2004), the evidence demonstrates that the UK public currently shows very low engagement with mitigating actions (Ockwell, et al, 2009;IPCC, 2007) and energy use is actually rising (Whitmarsh, 2009). There is therefore an urgent requirement to increase engagement with mitigating behaviours.…”

Retrofitting Passive Cooling Strategies to a Brisbane School: A Case Study of the Physical and Social Aspects

“…If it was left up to the individual there could be some teachers putting more effort into saving energy, but others not giving it a second thought and following a habit of cooling classrooms all day, every day in summer with air conditioning. Observing the latter behaviours could be discouraging to those teachers trying to conserve energy (Ockwell et al 2009).…”

“…This has been termed the 'free rider' effect; that some people consider it a waste of time to act in more sustainable ways when the majority is doing nothing (Ockwell et al 2009). …”