In June Mumbai had fewer than 40 days of water left. Across Europe, drought pushed the Loire, Po, Rhine and Danube to record lows this August. In parallel, wildfires in Spain and France drove over 300,000 people from their homes, while in Washington, DC, the temperature hit 102 degrees on July 3, breaking a record that had stood since 1872. To cope, the city cancelled the Fourth of July parade.
For decades, climate change was communicated as a future event. We used the dates of 2030 and 2050 to convey the window of opportunity and instill a shared sense of urgency. We talked about the issue mainly through science and data, and measured it in emissions and temperatures – thresholds to avoid at all costs.
As much as the climate communications field needs to continue to sound the warning alarm around what an even more dire future could look like, it must also help people navigate what has already arrived: to understand what is happening to them, and to see what they can do about it.
So how does it meet the moment? New tools, messengers, messages and strategies will be needed. But before that, we need to take stock of a few factors that have held the field back.
What’s held the field back
First, let’s call a spade a spade. Talking about climate change in a succinct, targeted way is hard for everyone. How do you distill a planetary, existential crisis into a nice and neat story that conveys a balanced message – equal parts concerning reality and still gives them a credible sense of agency – and do so to humans, whose capacity for another overwhelming problem may be limited? How do we do it when talking about climate change, sustainability and the environment itself is not as acceptable as it once was in certain locations? The organizations, specialists and larger coalition of the willing have to contend with these hurdles. Even the most adept communicators can struggle with the monumental task of messaging such a thorny, systemic and ever-changing issue.
Nevertheless, there are a few areas that have held the field back.
1. The climate communications field is chronically under-funded. No one publishes a reliable figure for what climate communications receives globally. This is a problem in and of itself – implying that the field is either not well-codified or taken seriously enough to measure. We can triangulate things a bit, though, to see the gap more clearly. For starters, most organizations doing this work are non-profits, so philanthropy is effectively the only money available to them. Climate mitigation philanthropy reached an estimated $11.7 to $18.4 billion in 2024, a record, and about 2.1% of global philanthropic giving. Adaptation and resilience, the domain where most people will actually encounter climate change, drew $870 million that year, still under a billion dollars for the entire world. Communication is one line item inside those totals, competing with everything else in them. Few foundations have dedicated programs for funding communications. And of course, funders want results they can point to, like emissions reduced or lives saved, and communications rarely produces an attribution claim that strong. How we talk about climate determines whether people believe they can act on it, and very few funders hold a budget that treats it that way.
2. Often, the messaging feels too macro and difficult for people to connect with. Climate ranked fifth among the issues U.S. voters named most important in 2024. The economy, immigration, healthcare and abortion were all higher priority items. Climate change can exacerbate issues like immigration and healthcare, but the connections between it, as well as the perceived hierarchy of needs for the average voter, does not hold it as such. In part, this disconnect can be explained by the fact that much climate communication relies on data that people cannot connect with.
We often talk in parts per million, incremental changes in temperature, billions and trillions of dollars needed to fill financing gaps, and so on. These numbers are critical to painting a global picture, but they do little to create a meaningful bond with people on the ground. Most telling, 1.5°C has been a rallying cry for the world’s largest countries and companies, but the planet’s largest historical emitter, the United States, doesn’t even measure temperature in Celsius. And a global annual average is a strange thing to build urgency around when the temperature outside your window routinely swings more than 1.5 degrees between breakfast and lunch. In a desert such as Saudi Arabia’s interior, temperatures can rise or fall by 15-25°C between afternoon and pre-dawn. Yes, 1.5°C is a global average, not a time-bound, daily fluctuation. But few humans think in those terms and the idea of a global average temperature is abstract at best.
Undoubtedly, scientific reasoning is essential to building the case – without it, negotiations between countries, climate models, and new technologies to mitigate GHG emissions would have no north star. But using it as a global metric for the general public to understand climate risks is psychologically awkward. The same can be said for net-zero. Most people simply don’t think in those terms. In fact, research published in Nature Climate Change found that greater science literacy and numeracy, while a worthwhile educational metric, did not produce uniformly greater concern about climate risk. Instead, the people most comfortable with science and numbers were also the most divided along cultural and political lines over climate risk. Of course, the scientific evidence is critical. Without it, the whole machinery grinds to a halt. But that technical explanation alone does not reliably create shared understanding. If anything, it can polarize.
So this means the right messages may actually have a narrower framing. Talking about how climate change impacts a child’s health rather than the entire planet may not be relevant for all audiences, but it will reach and influence the ones it is most relevant for. Laura Schifter, a senior fellow with the Aspen Institute where she leads This Is Planet Ed, explains the shift: “When climate becomes personal, it becomes much more meaningful. The opportunity now is to help people connect their experiences to our changing climate and understand how it’s different from the past and why it matters in their daily lives.”
3. Messengers, much like the messages, need to be relevant and relatable. For healthcare information we turn to doctors and nurses, for legal guidance we look to lawyers, when we need input on how to best educate children we defer to teachers and when we need our car fixed we ask a mechanic for advice. These are skilled professionals with credentials and titles, but also they are often embedded in their local communities. You’re arguably more likely to trust a family doctor than one you see on the national news.
We need messengers who can translate those messages into a language that means something in a particular community. Being a competent, eloquent orator does not mean that you’re trusted. Language and community relevance matter. Sarah Shanley Hope, who spent twelve years at The Solutions Project, both as its founding Executive Director and then as its Managing Director of Narrative Strategies, said that after the 2024 election, she heard one phrase repeated in progressive circles: “We need a Joe Rogan of the left.” One voice everyone could rally behind. “The answer was never about finding a single galvanizing figure,” she said. “It’s about investing in an ecosystem of trusted voices across communities, platforms, and cultures.” Searching for one messenger risks treating humanity as a single audience.
This may not lead to mistrust or friction, but it limits the chances of the message leading to informed action. If people cannot connect with the message, nor the messenger, they’ll stop listening. It’s not because they are not intelligent or do not care, but if you can’t speak in a way that meets them where they are – a delicate balance of choosing the right words and the right person to speak them, you’ll lose them.
The roadmap
First and foremost, the field of climate communications has an ecosystem of committed experts that have worked tirelessly for over a decade to reach the global population. Media platforms, specialized agencies, think tanks, authors, teachers and professors, scientists, investors among others have pioneered this field and done so in the face of increased political polarization and a shrinking funding landscape.
As the field attracts more talent and resources, the below guidelines can help steer efforts.
1. Find the right messengers
Local, trusted messengers outperform national campaigns, and the most recent Yale and George Mason polling suggests the field has been solving the wrong problem. Every ideological group names the same four most-trusted sources on global warming: climate scientists, family and friends, a primary care doctor, and TV weather reporters. However, the order differs between parties. Liberal Democrats put climate scientists first at 93%. Conservative Republicans put family and friends first at 55%, with climate scientists third at 44%.
Technical language can create distance – if someone uses language you do not understand it can feel embarrassing. The same can be said about shame-based advocacy – it might stir an emotion but it doesn’t motivate you, it may even cause you to recoil. Celebrities delivering pronouncements from a distance may capture our attention briefly, but they rarely galvanize action. Schifter says: “The best messenger depends on the audience you’re trying to reach. People trust people they already know and rely on. Climate becomes much more relevant when it’s part of conversations people are already having.” This very likely means that we will need a whole new generation of messengers to enter the field. Religious leaders, local business owners, mayors, journalists, teachers and even neighbors are all nodes in their local communities who need to be enlisted.
2. Make the language relevant
People need to understand how climate change affects them personally. John Marshall, CEO of Potential Energy Coalition, has run some of the most rigorous message testing in the climate space: more than 1,400 messages tested, and hundreds of ads and pieces of content produced. “I am searching for the empirical evidence of the solutions optimism fad – by which I mean you should NOT talk about the problem but only the solution – and I have not yet found it. It’s the actual consequences of climate on people’s lives that move people the most.” In fact, two of the five highest-performing ads his organization has ever produced focused on a single message: insurance rates are skyrocketing because of rising extreme weather.
And it goes beyond optimism versus pessimism. As Marshall says, “The flaw that people have in the way they think about optimism versus pessimism is that it’s not a relevant framework. The right axis is: what’s your need, and how can we solve that need? You need to activate a sense of real, tangible, personal risk in order to drive people toward a solution.” Prospect theory says the same thing. Avoiding a loss motivates more than securing an equivalent gain.
As Hope also says “We’ve created our own dialect. Once you explain what climate justice actually means (how green housing, community solar, and disaster resilience deliver on affordability, health, and jobs), more than half of Americans support it. But we’ve wrapped the concept in language that locks people out before they can get to the substance.”
3. Focusing on adaptation and resilience can help
Everything above applies to climate communication generally. Adaptation is where it works best, and where communications effort remains badly underinvested. As Marshall said: “Adaptation messaging is particularly productive because it’s a consequence message. And consequence messages beat conceptual messages every time.” Someone who hears that their city needs flood infrastructure to protect neighborhood property values is processing an adaptation message without ever using the word.
The mitigation-versus-adaptation split characterizes a lot of climate action, but few people outside of those actively working on climate change think of this dichotomy. Rather, they respond to relevant consequences on their lives. Schifter describes what works on the ground: the most effective organizers don’t lead with climate change. They lead with “the pollution their kids are breathing, the flooding on their street, the electric bills they can’t pay.” Then they point to something people can see and touch, the solar installation down the block or the community garden that manages stormwater. If need be, connect it to the larger picture, but don’t let the larger picture distract from discussing impact at the individual and household-levels.
4. Give people back their agency
If everyone is responsible, then responsibility sits nowhere. Put differently, if we all think the other person will do something about it, then no one will, and so no individual has any real leverage or role. What is left is a vague feeling of guilt or hopelessness, which rarely leads to action. Make the solutions visible, but tie them to the actual consequences people are facing as climate risks worsen. Then give them something specific to do, and show them it is already happening on their street. Hope, pride and even anger all work when they are aimed at something a person can act on in the immediate term.
5. Close the technology gap
Fossil fuel interests are already using sophisticated digital advertising tailored to the values of the communities they target. Generative AI may very likely make that work cheaper and faster.
But the same tools can be used by the climate communications field. For instance, AI can build virtual focus groups to test messages across audience segments. It can also identify trusted local messengers in communities national campaigns are missing. It can help communicators respond to a wildfire or a flood while the story is still live. Schifter acknowledges the trade: “AI has enormous potential to make climate information more accessible and relevant to people’s lives. At the same time, it risks accelerating misinformation and making it harder for people to know what information they can trust. That makes trusted messengers even more important.”
Arguably, if AI is helping to bring down costs of business operations for organizations, a field like climate communications, which is already under-funded, could benefit from leaner and more agile approaches.
Where we go next
Climate communications was built to explain a problem that had not arrived yet. It has arrived, and the assumptions underneath the work will need to evolve. Funders need to treat communications as infrastructure rather than an add-on. Organizations need to hand real budgets and real authority to the people who already hold their communities’ trust. And all of us in this work need to stop asking people to care about a global average, and start meeting them where the heat and the bills already are. People will act to protect what is theirs. And the climate communicators of the world have never been more needed to help in this effort.
