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By Nayah Thu  Img: Becker1999 On January 26th 2021, Greta Thunberg again criticised politicians and business leaders for inaction on the climate crisis in a video message to the Davos Agenda week, [1] aimed at an audience of mostly wealthy, White* men – a group wholly unrepresentative of the world’s population. It’s not just Davos that struggles with issues of racism and lack of representation - so too does the mainstream environmental movement. Even as the disproportionate effects of climate change on developing nations are becoming widely understood, there is insufficient focus on amplifying Black and Brown voices within the movement. In order to fairly and effectively fight the climate crisis, environmental actors need to embrace “intersectional environmentalism” and actively work to reach social justice. [2]
In 2014, a police officer fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager, in a St. Louis suburb. Missouri native Leah Thomas returned to her environmental science degree shaken by the tragedy. She realised that even when facts about the disproportionate effect of environmental injustices on Black and Brown communities were covered, “they’d brush over it and go back to talking about saving the salmon.” Eventually, she coined the term “intersectional environmentalism” – adapting Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of “intersectional feminism” to describe how “the same systems of oppression are at play in both environmental and racial justice sphere”. [3] When she defined it in her viral Environmentalists for Black Lives Matter social media graphic last year, the term entered the mainstream, and helped grow the movement towards self-reflection about inclusivity in the environmental movement. As Thomas said in the Instagram post that started it all: “It is not an optional ‘add-on’ to environmentalism. It is unfair to opt in and out of caring about racial injustices when many of us cannot.” [4] With Joe Biden nominating Michael Reagan to be the first ever Black head of the United States EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), [5] focus is returning to the overwhelming Whiteness of the environmental movement and its leadership. As Jessie Sitnick acknowledges, lack of representation in leadership leads to problems in reaching those audiences who are under-represented, thanks to “the inaccessibility of the language we use, the cultural references we make, the baked-in assumptions that what matters most to White mainstream environmentalists should resonate the same way with everyone else.” [6] A 2014 report from Green 2.0, a non-profit diversity initiative, found that, within participating environmental NGOs, 88 percent of staff and 95 percent of boards were White. [7] This extreme lack of diversity stems from a lack of recruitment and inclusion in the environmental community, where, according to Dorceta Taylor, a professor of Environmental Sociology at the University of Michigan, some of the “white males that occupy the leadership positions…don’t even have environmental degrees” [8]. Taylor urges people to “ get over the myth that students of colour are not qualified, they’re not educated enough, and they’re not taking the appropriate course work.” It is the responsibility of those in power to make room for the voices and perspectives needed to effectively fight issues of environmental injustice. The overwhelming lack of consideration for the voices and experiences of Black, Brown and Indigenous people is nothing new. In 1982, Benjamin Chavis coined the term “environmental racism”, meaning“racial discrimination in environmental policy-making, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of colour for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of colour from leadership of the ecology movements”. [9] He and others, including “father of environmental justice,”[10] Dr. Robert Bullard, have investigated targeted and widespread policies which have caused concrete harm to communities of colour. For example, between the 1930s and 1978, 82 % of all of the city of Houston, Texas’ waste was dumped in Black neighbourhoods, despite only 25% of the population being Black. [11] This is not an issue that is confined to the United States. For example, a 2018 Natural England and ONS report found that White Britons were nearly 20% more likely to regularly access green spaces on a regular weekly basis than their BAME** counterparts, while another report in 2019 found that BAME Britons were up to 29% more likely than their White compatriots to be exposed to particulate matter pollution. [12] As Thomas puts it, “the environmentalism that we have now that has been thought of as being “progressive” has only been progressive for one group of people and that’s not fair.” [3] Without a concrete focus on racial justice in the environmental movement, which is only possible by amplifying the voices of those affected, climate action will only end up exacerbating inequality around the world. Beyond environmental racism, the mainstream environmental movement suffers from a case of severe cultural appropriation. From the White-washing of vegan and vegetarian diets in the media, despite the fact that three times as many non-White than White Americans identify as vegetarian, [13] to the many other sustainable practices co-opted from communities of colour and repackaged for the White mainstream, this trend of cultural appropriation and a lack of acknowledgment of the roots of sustainable practices feeds into systems of oppression and marginalisation without allowing for meaningful cross-cultural communication. As long as White environmental activists continue to take what is convenient for them, without committing themselves to intersectional environmentalism, anti-racism, and listening to and amplifying the voices of Black, Brown and Indigenous environmentalists, climate action that is just and which serves all members of humanity will never be achieved. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/greta-thunberg-climate-response-rogoff-greenpeace-unccd/ [2] https://www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com/ [3]https://assembly.malala.org/stories/climate-activist-leah-thomas-on-intersectional-environmentalism [4] https://www.instagram.com/p/CAvaxdRJRxu/ [5] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03621-6 [6]https://argylepr.com/insight-and-inspiration/green-and-white-why-we-must-dismantle-racism-in-the-environmental-sector/ [7]http://orgs.law.harvard.edu/els/files/2014/02/FullReport_Green2.0_FINALReducedSize.pdf [8]https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-green-groups-became-so-white-and-what-to-do-about-it [9] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/what-is-environmental-racism-pollution-covid-systemic/ [10]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/21/what-is-environmental-injustice-and-why-is-the-guardian-covering-it [11]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/20/robert-bullard-interview-environmental-justice-civil-rights-movement [12] https://impakter.com/environmental-racism-why-does-it-still-exist/ [13]https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv833z/dear-white-vegans-stop-appropriating-food * We have made an editorial decision to capitalise all terms denoting race (i.e. White, Black and Brown) as this highlights the fact that race is socially constructed. By choosing to capitalise the term White, we are choosing to acknowledge that Whiteness is not a neutral default or ‘natural’ category, while Blackness and Brownness are other. Instead, Whiteness is just as much a social created category. We realise that there is live debate surrounding this issue, and welcome your views on the matter. For more information on the debate, we recommend heading here and here. These are starting points, and there is much more information out there for those who are interested in learning more. **An acronym used in the UK to refer to people from ‘Black and Ethnic Minority’ backgrounds. It is a heavily contested term (e.g. see here, here and here as starting points), but we use it here as this was the category used in the studies cited.
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By Bridget Stuart  Image: NASA Ice A haunting vision of a skeletal polar bear staring into the camera, clinging to a piece of melting ice.
This is an image all too well associated with climate change, and while pictures can indeed be powerful tools of communication, the emotive visual appeal of this particular image hasn’t been as powerful as perhaps it was intended to be. People just don’t care enough about polar bears to stop flying or become vegan or install solar panels or protest against their government’s lack of climate action. And why should they? For most us, polar bears exist far-away in the ‘North Pole’, are not important for our livelihoods, and confusingly abstract climate change in our minds. This highlights the true fickle nature of the beast that is climate change, and explains in part why so many people across the world are disengaged from the issue, or worse, deny that it is even happening. The very definition of climate change is a thorny one, and evidence shows that people often conflate it with other environmental issues, such as ozone layer depletion (1). Also, as its effects are not directly observable, people perceive climate change to be distant in time and space. For example, just 43% of American adults think that climate change will harm them personally (2). There is also a stark cultural divide on this matter. A 2019 YouGov survey of 30,000 people across 28 countries found that the percentage of people in Eastern and Middle Eastern countries who think climate change will have a great impact on their lives ranges from 38-75%, whereas in Western countries people’s perceptions of the risk is much weaker, ranging from 10-32% (3). This is an example of spatial and temporal cognitive discounting, which refers to the process of cost-benefit analysis that people perform to weigh up the probability and cost of potential risks. While some of climate change’s effects are being felt today, it is predominantly people in the Global South who are suffering; and much of the worst is still yet to come. Therefore, for many people the costs of taking action currently do not seem to outweigh the benefits, as climate change is just not seen as a big enough threat in day-to-day life. While opinion polls show that 63% of US adults are worried about climate change (2) and 69% of UK adults believe the climate situation to be just as bad as scientists have proven (4), the rates of inaction by individuals and government alike are stark. This phenomenon is called the attitude-behaviour gap, which occurs when what people say doesn’t correlate with what they actually do. There is of course a plethora of reasons for this. Psychological factors include inertia, limited cognitive resources, the externalisation of responsibility, and fatalism. However, structural and institutional factors are probably more significant, as well as socio-demographic ones. Giving governments’ and people’s inaction (predominantly of those in the Global North) the benefit of doubt, it could be argued that there is still some confusion around the topic of climate change. Despite the 97% consensus within the scientific community that climate change is happening and is the result of human activity (5), as with all science, there does remain some degree of uncertainty. However, the media has played a major role in wildly exaggerating that uncertainty and fostering scepticism, thus enabling institutional negligence. But, uncertainty aside, when it comes to climate change beliefs, partisanship (in the US) has been shown to be a stronger influence than the level of knowledge or understanding of climate science (6). Indeed, political ideology is widely acknowledged to be a significant influence on climate change-related beliefs. The general trend is that right-wing conservatism is associated with less engagement on issues of climate and less support for environmental policy, in comparison to liberal social ideologies. This socio-political divide can be better understood if we perceive climate change as a narrative, socially constructed through societal and group norms. Individual members of a group, such as a political party, will endorse the values and opinions most central to their group. If a strong awareness of climate breakdown and a passion for climate justice are not included within these group values, then they will generally not be endorsed by individual members. This in-group homogeneity is perpetuated further by confirmation bias, or the tendency to selectively seek and process information that aligns with your existing values and views, and actively ignoring information which contradicts them. So, there exists a two-fold problem in that climate change itself is a highly technical, multi-faceted issue and that, as the title of George Marshall’s 2014 book states, people’s “brains are wired to ignore climate change” (7). It is at this intersection of factors that corporations, mass media and political parties exploit individuals’ understandings of an already complex issue, driving wedges into the fault lines of their psychological biases. These ‘wedges’ include 'fake news', subliminal messaging, polarisation and disinformation, all increasingly proliferated via social media. So, what can be done about the situation? How can we communicate with people on climate change in a way that is effective and influential? On a positive note, most people feel it is not too late to avoid the worst effects of climate change, if the necessary drastic changes are achieved fast enough (3). This represents a window of opportunity through which climate communications can apply existing scientific research to empower people with accurate information, in order to galvanise collective action and systemic change. There are many brilliant scientific research bodies, charitable and public sector organisations, and global initiatives who are working tirelessly to spread these important messages and calling loudly for a socially just and cohesive global mobilisation. We should heed their call—otherwise, denial, discounting and disenfranchisement will steadily, and ever rapidly, drive us forwards to the point of no return. REFERENCES
Summary by Bridget Stuart  To kick off Hilary Term 2021, we were joined by George Marshall, the Founding Director of Climate Outreach, and Matthew C. Nisbet, Professor of Communication, Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University.
George started off by impressing upon the audience the social justice and ethical element of climate communications. He stressed that all people have a right to adequately understand climate change and the impact it will have on their lives, so that they are able to make informed decisions. A lack of information leaves people vulnerable to misinformation, which can make climate change an “amplifier of the existing schisms in society”. George pointed out that the narrative around climate change is socially constructed, conveyed through social and normative mechanisms. The identity of the communicator is also important, and to be trusted they need to reflect the listener’s own identity and values. Therefore, people’s perceptions and processing of climate information represents a nexus of identity, values, social norms and group affiliation. As a result, individuals are susceptible to polarisation on issues of climate. George proceeded to talk about some work carried out by Climate Outreach. He emphasised the importance of connecting with the people, establishing shared identities and values, and framing communications in a way that is culturally significant. He finished by asking the world to unite its different narratives into a cohesive broad public mandate with a shared purpose. Professor Matthew Nisbet began by defining this time as a critical transitionary moment in which important work needs to be done to translate the findings from climate communications research into material applications. Climate communications has its work cut out for it in this regard as even the definition of climate change is thorny. Misinformation campaigns have capitalised on that fact, creating debate around objective science rather than subjective values and ideologies. Professor Nisbet described the different historical frames which have described climate change: an issue of market failure, of tech innovation, and now of social justice. He presented a series of climate opinion polls in America, pointing out that support for policy can exist independent of agreement on the science. He rounded off his presentation by talking about the importance of socially cohesive movements in providing a window of opportunity to create positive systemic change. The presentations were followed by a lively Q&A session, summarised below.
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