Abstract
Paris Agreement notwithstanding, the slim chances that global mean temperature rise can be kept below the 1.5 °C/2 °C international objectives continue to diminish. This unwelcome reality, and growing evidence of limits to adaptation, mean that citizens as well as elite decision makers need to engage with knowledge about the likelihood and implications of severe future impacts, and the scale of mitigation required to avoid them, the likes of which few want to hear. This paper seeks lessons in the existing literature that could inform communication efforts in an era of impending high-end climate change, and uses the outputs of a specially convened workshop to highlight both the scale of the challenge, and elements of an emerging new agenda. To be more than mere ‘narrators of doom’, and promote more adaptive strategies, it argues that communicators must recognise the need for ‘active hope’, constructed from realistic goals, imaginable paths, and a meaningful role for individuals within a collective response to problems at hand. New, more dialogical forms of communication, with various audiences in a range of venues are needed, in which new high-end climate messages can be conveyed and processed with citizens and decision makers. Ideally, these processes should be facilitated by highly skilled teams. These innovative forms of communication will require significant additional investment and training.
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Notes
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‘The Challenge of Communicating Unwelcome Climate Messages’ (Cambridge, UK, 16–17 April 2015), included participants from, inter alia, UK government departments, consultancies in planning and communication, climate science, psychology, and art.
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This is thus a more psychological phenomenon than the more concrete type of action referred to in the IPCC definition of the term maladaptation.
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Contingency planning for 5–7 °C presumably takes decision making into the realm of climate engineering.
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See entries on the website http://isthishowyoufeel.weebly.com/this-is-how-scientists-feel.html.
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Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the support of the EU-funded High-End cLimate Impacts and eXtremes (HELIX) project (grant agreement no 603,864) and especially Asher Minns, who initiated the idea of a workshop on ‘Unwelcome Messages’. The participation of workshop participants in April 2015, and comments on a working paper by Simon Sharpe, Susanne Moser and Chris Rapley are gratefully acknowledged.
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Rayner, T. (2018). Feeling the Heat: The Challenge of Communicating ‘High-End’ Climate Change. In: Leal Filho, W., Manolas, E., Azul, A., Azeiteiro, U., McGhie, H. (eds) Handbook of Climate Change Communication: Vol. 1. Climate Change Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69838-0_20
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