Engaging the public with the climate crisis

From ice storms in Texas to flash floods in Sudan, or forest fires engulfing Australia, Canada and Chile, extreme weather events are increasingly common around the world. Recent UK heatwaves, where temperatures topped 40°C for the first time ever, brought home a new reality that nowhere is safe from the changes caused by the effects of human-made climate change. 

As widespread public realisation dawns about the climate crisis and the scale and pace of change required to decarbonise, one question looms large:

For some: not a lot. The only answer is system changes, which are reliant on those in power. For others though, that change must start somewhere. While international political and economic decisions are essential, people power also has the extraordinary potential to be transformative in responding to the climate emergency.

University of Bath Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh MBE is one of those people.

Lorraine is a leading international environmental psychologist, Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST), co-Director of Bath’s Institute of Sustainability and Climate Change, IPCC lead author, government advisor and member of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG).

For the past two decades she has been championing new approaches to engaging the public with climate change in ways which resonate, change behaviours, and build support for the policies desperately needed to cut emissions. She literally wrote the book on it.

In 2015, Lorraine edited ‘Engaging The Public with Climate Change: Behaviour Change and Communication’. Since, this has become a go-to resource for those studying and working in climate change. More recently, she co-authored a section of Greta Thunberg’s international bestseller ‘The Climate Book’. Now, as countries around the world put in place policies and actions to curb emissions, her research and expertise is in hot demand.

Shifting attitudes on climate change

Professor Whitmarsh’s own research interests have long revolved around people’s changing attitudes, values and behaviours in relation to climate change as well as the best ways to engage them in the topic. One of her first projects as a PhD student at Bath explored what impact the 2003 floods in the UK had on those directly affected and how this related to their thoughts about climate change.

“It seemed like a no-brainer at the time that those affected by flooding would also be the ones most concerned about the risks climate change posed, yet this wasn’t the case,” she explains. People instead interpreted flooding as being caused by more local and visible problems, such as blocked ditches and drains. In fact, people’s environmental and political values were far more likely to influence their climate change concern than any experience of extreme weather she says.  

Two decades on and Prof Whitmarsh thinks values and ideology still remain the strongest predictors of people’s climate concern, but the picture is much more mixed nowadays. One of the biggest shifts she has observed has been the decline in climate scepticism and the increase in public awareness brought about through campaigns, via changing media and public discourse but also increasingly people’s own experiences of climate change effects.

“Around the world in recent years there has definitely been growing political and public acceptance that we need urgent action,” she says. “The language has changed, too. Terms like climate ‘crisis’ and ‘ecological emergency’ have become mainstream and to some extent have shifted the dial about how soon that change needs to come about.”

While climate scepticism has waned, she acknowledges that this has sometimes shifted to climate ‘delayism’ among those who argue that the financial cost of climate action is too great given other pressures. More broadly, she says that although people are aware of the problem and want action to be taken, there is generally less clarity on where attention should be focused and how changes can be brought about.

This is where CAST’s expertise is making significant inroads.

Through CAST, Prof Whitmarsh and colleagues focus on four challenging areas which have the potential for substantial climate impacts, but which have so far proven difficult to change.

These cover: transport and mobility, heating and cooling, food and diet and material consumption.

Against these priorities, their research programme is structured around four themes: ‘Visioning’; ‘Learning’; ‘Trialling’ and ‘Engaging’.

Listen to Professor Whitmarsh on the Research With Impact podcast

Old habits die hard

For a long time, environmental campaigners had been working on an assumption that behaviour change in relation to these environmental challenges could be achieved by explaining the problem to the public: the more information and evidence you could give people about the problem, the more likely you would raise their awareness, and changes to their behaviour would flow from this.

This form of one-way communications became dominant in the 1990s and 2000s: from government communications to campaigning materials and documentary films, such as Al Gore’s famous 2006 documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

Whilst Professor Whitmarsh says this has been important for raising awareness of the issue and building public support, the ‘tell them and they’ll change’ approach has more often failed in bringing about widespread actions required. Her analysis suggests that one-way, linear, broadcast communications can fuel a ‘value-action gap’, whereby the public is aware of the problem, but face psychological barriers to understanding their own role within it and the behavioural and structural challenges to action.

Alongside University of Bath Emeritus Professor Bas Verplanken, a leading author on the science of habits and the concept of habit discontinuity, Prof Whitmarsh has pioneered new, more sophisticated approaches to achieving behaviour change by targeting interventions at so-called ‘moments of change’ in people’s lives.

These include major lifestyle upheavals like moving house, getting married or having a baby, starting a new job, or even adjusting to major global events such as Covid-19. During these moments, people are typically more open and receptive to changes and by adopting new behaviours adjustments are more likely to stick, she says.

The team has advised local authorities and large organisations on using this approach to great effect. They have shown how so many of our everyday actions, like commuting, are performed on autopilot and that we can use moments of flux to reprogramme what we do, whether that’s cycling instead of driving to work or having a ‘Meat Free Monday’. However, she warns the window of opportunity to change habits only stays open so long: go past a few months and habits are locked in again.

A number of these insights into behaviour change fed into the 2022 House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee report ‘In our hands: behaviour change for climate and environmental goals’. Prof Whitmarsh was the inquiry’s special advisor, while her co-author on a number of behaviour change studies and CAST Associate Director Professor Wouter Poortinga (based at Cardiff University) provided evidence.

The report calls on the government to learn from examples of where it enabled behaviour change, including during the pandemic, and to enable people to make the necessary shifts in how we travel, what we eat and buy and how we use energy at home. It suggests that government needs to use every lever – regulations, financial incentives and disincentives, changes to infrastructure, and education – to address the barriers which currently prevent people from changing behaviours across key areas.

Most importantly, however, it highlights the importance of putting fairness at the heart of behaviour change interventions to avoid placing a burden on those who can least afford it. One example of this is providing financial support for low-income households as part of a national drive to improve the energy efficiency of our homes. Prof Whitmarsh says this is a crucial piece of the jigsaw. “The importance of fairness is shown so consistently from all research on public acceptability of policies, not just climate policies. People often care more about “is it fair?” than “does it work? It’s fundamental to get this right,” she says.

The House of Lords report also calls for the launch of a public engagement strategy to build support for net zero and to help people adopt new technologies and reduce carbon-intensive consumption in key areas where behaviour change is required. Prof Whitmarsh says one of the lessons from the pandemic is how crucial clear communication is in building public understanding and consensus around climate actions.

Her research has also looked at ways to build deeper levels of public engagement on the subject.  

Staying positive

Amid increasingly dire warnings from the IPCC and others about the risks posed by climate change, Prof Whitmarsh is often asked how to remain optimistic. She describes actions to cut carbon emissions as a race against time and the very clear threats that climate change poses.

“Things are moving so quickly in relation to climate change, and it is clear we do not have endless time left to act. But there is still a window of opportunity, and my passion is to keep pushing at this, so that we can do all we can to protect the planet for future generations to enjoy,” she says.

Some of the CAST team’s latest research has explored rising incidence of eco-anxiety among young people. Ground-breaking research at Bath led by Caroline Hickman and Dr Liz Marks released in 2021 to worldwide attention showed that nearly half of young people were affected by eco-anxiety caused by governmental inaction to tackle climate change. Prof Whitmarsh and colleagues have developed this further and found that eco-anxiety can actually be a driver for positive change.

Finally, there’s a message from CAST about modelling the changes you want to see in others when it comes to the environment and how taking such actions can be both motivating and positive for individual wellbeing. Prof Whitmarsh’s research has looked at the wider benefits to taking pro-environmental actions, such as the health and wellbeing benefits of changing diets or increasing active travel.

“Sometimes behaviour change in relation to climate is presented as a limiter, that we are being prevented from doing something. Our research has shown how very many of these changes can be enabling and beneficial to people’s lives: they report feeling happier and healthier as a result. The more we will shift social norms and help bring about the shifts in society which are so important right now,” she says.