Humanity will never be able to defeat a threat it cannot perceive

Elizabeth Boulton.

In 2013, one of the world’s leading public relations experts, Bob Pickard, cried out to the climate world: “mobilise us!” In a frustrated op-ed, he listed 20 key problems with climate communication. One of them was “story fatigue”: bland stories with “highly repetitive and stale” themes.

Climate information is still often confusing, unengaging and absent from the wider public discourse. Linguistic analysis found that the most recent IPCC report was less readable than seminal papers by Einstein. Last year, in America, climate news media coverage rates dropped despite the historical Paris Climate Summit and Pope Francis’ climate Encyclical.

One key risk is complacency – a perception that the issue is now resolved. This is despite the risk increasing, as our response lags.

One study found that Australia had the highest percentage of climate sceptics in the world, (17% as compared to 12% in the USA). Analysis of global attitudes in 2015 found that, while across the world, 54% of people considered climate change a “very serious problem,” in Australia this figure was only 43%.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a PhD Candidate in cross-disciplinary approaches to climate and environmental risk at the Australian National University, Elizabeth Boulton -  “It’s time for a new age of Enlightenment: why climate change needs 60,000 artists to tell its story.”