Enabling the messenger: How can the IPCC get its message across to the public?
The pages of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s new reports tells a range of compelling stories about the huge changes humans and our environment face as the planet warms.
Trouble is, these narratives are couched in fairly inaccessible language.
We look at two new pieces of research aimed at analysing the way the IPCC communicates and improving the panel’s rapport with the public.
Bringing the IPCC to life
For its new report, ‘Science & stories: Bringing the IPCC to life’, communications group Climate Outreach & Information Network (COIN) interviewed 16 communications experts from UK media organisations and NGOs.
Although the IPCC’s primary audience is policymakers, COIN says the panel’s attempts to reach the wider public are failing to hit home. Indeed, it says public engagement with climate change has “regressed since the mid 2000s and the political consensus [on addressing climate change] has started to unravel”.
COIN says the IPCC’s difficulty in communicating to the public can be traced to its outdated model of “how science is incorporated into society, and how social change occurs”. For example, it notes that the reports – even those parts aimed at policymakers, not scientists, are expressed in very technical language. Former Telegraph journalist Louise Gray told COIN:
“[The IPCC is] a noble body. It is doing something profound and important. But as a journalist it is quite impenetrable. The reports are diï¬?cult to read and the Secretariat’s oï¬?ce is quite diï¬?cult to get hold of. And when you do, they tend to speak in very scientiï¬c terms, which are very diï¬?cult for journalists to interpret for the public.”
COIN makes a series of recommendations to the IPCC, graded from ‘easy’ to ‘difficult’. Easy to implement, for example, are COIN’s recommendations to invest in communications and embrace video content and social media. An enhanced budget would allow the panel’s communications staff to expand their role, and train scientists with an aptitude for communication to speak about their work to the public.
The report also makes some more challenging recommendations. These include battling the perception of the IPCC as dry and bureaucratic by allowing scientists to speak more openly about their passion for their work. The report compares the IPCC with another high-profile scientific collaboration – the CERN project and its particle accelerator, which allows scientists to talk about their work in a personal way, expressing excitement about what they do. The report says:
“[T]he data produced by CERN are no more inherently engaging or interesting than the ï¬ndings of the IPCC. But they have been presented to the world in a way that is congruent with peoples’ intuitive grasp of what makes a good story (and, by extension, what ï¬res their imagination).”
Human stories about the effects of climate change are also urgently required, the report says. This shouldn’t be the responsibility of the IPCC, it adds. Instead, people should start to use the work of the IPCC to build compelling narratives about the effects of climate change, from forced migration as a result of extreme weather events to local effects felt in daily life.
Analysing the language and understanding the audience
COIN isn’t the only organisation examining how the IPCC communicates its message and how we draw meaning from the IPCC’s scientific findings.
Research presented at Exeter University’s Transformational Climate Science conference last week also examined how the IPCC communicates its work.
At Leeds University, Dr Ralf Barkemeyer is conducting a linguistic analysis of all the IPCC reports, and the media coverage of them. He is testing for two things: how optimistic the publications are, and how easy they are to understand.
Sharing his preliminary results, he said he found tabloids were most likely to present extremely optimistic or pessimistic reports on climate science. Language from broadsheets, meanwhile, became both more readable – requiring less prior education to be understandable – and less dispassionate from the time the IPCC first started producing its reports to the present day.
Barkemeyer pointed out the IPCC summaries for policymakers are by far the least readable of all the texts analysed, on average requiring a reading level equivalent to a PhD and two years of work experience.