Saffron O'Neill

“Fear Won't Do It”: Promoting Positive Engagement With Climate Change Through Visual and Iconic Representations

Fear-inducing representations of climate change are widely employed in the public domain. However, there is a lack of clarity in the literature about the impacts that fearful messages in climate change communications have on people’s senses of engagement with the issue and associated implications for public engagement strategies. Some literature suggests that using fearful representations of climate change may be counterproductive. The authors explore this assertion in the context of two empirical studies that investigated the role of visual, and iconic, representations of climate change for public engagement respectively. Results demonstrate that although such representations have much potential for attracting people’s attention to climate change, fear is generally an ineffective tool for motivating genuine personal engagement. Nonthreatening imagery and icons that link to individuals’ everyday emotions and concerns in the context of this macro-environmental issue tend to be the most engaging. Recommendations for constructively engaging individuals with climate change are given.

Reorienting Climate Change Communication for Effective Mitigation Forcing People to be Green or Fostering Grass-Roots Engagement?

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 individuals 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.

Is Weather Event Attribution Necessary for Adaptation Funding

The new science of weather event attribution is unlikely to make useful contributions to adaptation funding decisions. International funds created largely for funding climate adaptation programs and projects in developing countries were first legally established through the seventh session of the Conference of the Parties (COP-7) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) held in 2001 at Marrakesh. In 2009, at COP-15 in Copenhagen, delegates “took note” of a pledge from developed countries to commit U.S.

Climate denier, skeptic, or contrarian?

30 billion for the period 2010–2012, ramping up to

Disciplines, Geography, and Gender in the Framing of Climate Change

100 billion per annum by 2020, to support a mixture of climate adaptation and mitigation activities in developing countries. International adaptation finance has therefore been, and continues to be, a significant political issue for the FCCC and for international institutions, such as the World Bank, the Global Environment Facility, and regional development banks (1). Yet governance arrangements and allocation principles for these climate adaptation funds remain both underdeveloped and politically contested (2, 3). A Green Climate Fund for disbursing such funds was established at COP-16 in Cancún, and a Transitional Committee is currently developing operational documents for the fund to be adopted at COP-17 in Durban, South Africa, later this year.

Green identity, green living? The role of pro-environmental self-identity in determining consistency across diverse pro-environmental behaviours

Assigning credibility or expertise is a fraught issue, particularly in a wicked phenomenon like climate change—as Anderegg et al. (1) discussed in a recent issue of PNAS. However, their analysis of expert credibility into two distinct “convinced” and “unconvinced” camps and the lack of nuance in defining the terms “climate deniers,” “skeptics,” and “contrarians” both oversimplify and increase polarization within the climate debate.

An iconic approach for representing climate change

abstracts to classify each oral presentation into a domain, not the presumed background of each presenter. The Copenhagen Congress was exceptional in its disciplinary spread of papers (compared, for example, to the knowledge domains represented in the IPCC). We found contributions from diverse knowledge domains—from ethics and philosophy to the geosciences (Fig. 1). Indeed, the majority of papers were not from the geosciences. Yet the Con-gress secretariat chose to emphasize geosciences in to prevent imminent environmental catastrophe) are proving elusive. Rather than advocating the selection of a particular frame, we instead suggest that multiple frames should be allowed to gain legitimacy, opening the way to multiple solutions even though with their in -herent complexity they may initially be unappealing. An episteMologiCAl hierArChY. There is emerging recognition that different institutions promote certain types of climate change knowledge production, while other types are marginalized—a situation we term an “epistemological hierarchy.” In a forthcoming article in