New York hosted one of the world's largest climate meetings last week. New York Climate Week (Climate Week NYC), held between September 20-27, held its most comprehensive gathering to date with over 1500 events spread across the city. The week, organized by the Climate Group since 2009 and coinciding with the United Nations General Assembly, brought together a wide range of people, from the business world to governments, from scientists to civil society. Focusing on "energy, impact, action", many topics were discussed, from clean energy transformation to climate finance, from food systems to nature and health.
But among hundreds of topics, one question posed in one session was particularly striking: “Why does climate communication keep failing, and what does it take to really make a breakthrough?” The session, organized by open-source community initiative The Sidebar, started out with a dilemma: The evidence for climate change is stronger than ever. The results are visible, measurable, and impact hundreds of millions of people. Extreme heat, changing precipitation regimes, floods, drought, crop losses and changes in ecosystems are no longer scenarios for the distant future. Yet the public debate on climate remains fragmented and contentious. To put the question in a simpler form: We have science. So why are we losing the story?
THE LIMITS OF THE CLIMATE NARRATIVE
The first leg of the answer is sought in the media system itself. Independent climate journalism and communications struggle to survive in a media environment where there is intense competition for attention, trust and resources. Particularly in the Global South, fact-based, locally fed climate journalism is produced with much more limited resources than the more powerful actors shaping the public narrative.
Another issue is geography. The institutions that shape the global climate narrative and those directly experiencing the consequences of the crisis are often not in the same place. Communities living with extreme heat, floods, changing precipitation, crop losses or displacement have the strongest experience of what climate change actually looks like. In turn, they often have less power to determine how their own stories are told.
The cultural barrier is related to who the climate communication is addressed to. Climate language is often shaped by audiences who are already familiar with these concepts, are educated, follow the policy agenda, and predominantly speak English. However, climate change is experienced all over the world with different languages, identities, livelihoods and cultural references. A message that resonates at New York Climate Week cannot be expected to have the same meaning in another geography. Perhaps the problem is not that the climate crisis is not adequately explained; The narrative has difficulty connecting with the reality people live in.
PERMANENT INVESTMENT REQUIREMENT
Another, less visible aspect of the issue is financing. Reports, campaigns and short-term communication projects can find support for climate communication. But it is much more difficult to find the same sustained resources for local journalism, culturally specific storytelling, long-term reader and audience relationships, or permanent media infrastructures that will enable a credible climate narrative to take root. This is exactly one of the points that the session at The Sidebar brought up for discussion: Can short-term campaigns replace long-term investment in reliable media and communication infrastructure?
When viewed this way, the problem is only "How can the climate be explained better?" It's not just a question. Who is actually being contacted, who cannot be reached, which narrators do people trust? What changes when the climate story starts from people's lived reality, not the industry's preferred language? These questions also show that climate communication should be considered as a part of the infrastructure of climate action, not as a promotional activity that comes into play at the end of scientific studies, policies and projects.
“DETOX” TO THE CLIMATE LANGUAGE
"The Jargon Detox" event held at Climate Week turned the jargon of the climate world into a fun competition. In the session, accompanied by Adam Met, bassist of the US independent pop music group AJR and Planet Reimagined manager, and climate scientist Kate Marvel, participants were asked to talk about climate for 60 seconds without using technical terms.
Phrases such as “net zero”, “compatible with the Paris Agreement”, “1.5°C” and “nature-based solutions” were prohibited. The question behind the entertaining format was a serious one: How can people be expected to take action if they do not understand the language used? Because the story of someone living with the climate crisis often doesn't start with jargon. A farmer sees changing rainfall, a city dweller sees extended heat waves, a family sees a rising energy bill. Before the climate crisis is a technical concept, it is a fact of daily life.
