George, could you briefly introduce yourself?
I’m a climate change communication specialist and the co-founder of the UK-based charity COIN, the Climate Outreach and Information Network. Our aim is to ensure climate change and its impacts are understood, accepted and acted upon across the breadth of society in a manner that creates a truly sustainable future.
I recently wrote the book “Don't Even Think About It - Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change”. I started from the following apparent paradox: though climate change awareness and understanding are fairly high in society, studies show that levels of concern stay low. 30% of adults cannot even remember having had a single conversation about climate change in their entire life!
COIN’s ambition is to overcome the socially constructed silence that surrounds climate change. To do so, we argue that climate change communication needs to be re-thought: you need to start
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Can you elaborate?
In our daily lives, we are surrounded by way more information than we can take in. We are constantly having to make quick decisions as to what to disregard or ignore. This process is a socially constructed one: we act under a strong peer pressure. We look for social tags or cues and tend to pay much more attention to topics that “people like us” find important. This leads to a self-reinforcing mechanism: social groups can make a specific topic omnipresent – or completely taboo.
WE IGNORE INFORMATION ALL THE TIME - FOLLOWING OUR PEERS' SOCIAL CUES
The latter happened with climate change in large fractions of society. In the UK for instance, concern for climate change has gradually become strongly politicised and a preserve of the left. COIN did a lot of work in the last elections to shake off this social tag and develop a climate change storyaudible for voters of the centre right: we built on values like localism, energy security or the good life. How do you tell the climate change story,