--- "Everything will go back to normal, just like the river" ---
Struck by a BBC interview with this guy, his neighbourhood devastated by the bloody awful flooding in Spain.
He is not calling for global climate action. He just wants his normal life back, thanks.
It's easy to assume that people walloped by floods or fires will suddenly become lifelong evangelists for climate action. Wrong. As this old, but still insightful Climate Outreach report from 2014 shows, it's more complex than that. https://lnkd.in/eqvXSTFE. A memorable bit of George Marshall's book, Don't Even Think About It, is when he talks to people burned out by wildfires, who if anything are even less worried about climate change than they were before.
Cognitive dissonance? Well yes, but that's climate psychology for you. I was struck also by this brand new Yale Program on Climate Change Communication research showing that showing people flood risk maps with their homes underwater actually *decreases* people's worries about future sea level rise. https://lnkd.in/eud_AwtK
It works the other way of course. If you're already concerned about climate, being flooded out is likely to increase that concern - as we found in 2020 https://lnkd.in/efbCP6A8. Conclusion: our ideas about climate change are filtered through our ideas about other things.
Which doesn't mean they are set in stone. At the big level people are ever more worried about climate impacts, as we found in our Britain Talks Climate research earlier this year. https://lnkd.in/eXWS_TnP. So I'm not saying all these floods and fires etc aren't seeping into our collective consciousness. I wrote for BusinessGreen a few years ago about the slow, creeping but ultimately game changing narrative force of feeling that things are increasingly *going wrong*. https://lnkd.in/e_4GMsGj
But it's always worth checking the impulse to say "I told you so", not least because no-one likes a smart arse. People who've been hit by disasters want to be helped, and that those in charge are doing what's needed so it never happens again. And we can all feel powerless in the face of biblical floods and stuff, so it can be easy to kill that critical sense of agency.
The trick is to combine a few things
- acknowledging what people know - that the climate is changing in front of our eyes and it's scary
- that there are things we can do together to be more resilient, and many ways we can do our bit
- to harness the power of human resilience and tell stories of action & community spirit
- and of course to know our audience, and the worldviews and priors they have through which their climate stories are filtered.
