Weather Communication Methods

Given the recent fracas between India (Lakshadweep) and Maldives, and the dismaying fact that there was very limited discussion on protecting the fragile ecology of Lakshadweep with the onslaught of tourist interest, here's something highly creative by another tiny island nation! Palau is an island in the Western Pacific Ocean, near the Philippines. Tourism constitutes about 85% of GDP and 63% of employment. Tourists outnumber the population by eight to one!! So, given the ecological impact such a large floating population of tourists can have on their fragile environment on which they depend so heavily, the tiny island has been doing a lot of things to get the tourists to participate in the protection of their island. The starting point is called the Palau Pledge, launched in 2018, courtesy of the Australian ad agency, Host Havas. With this, Palau became the first country to incorporate environmental practices into its immigration laws and this manifests in the form of a pledge (issued in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) that is stamped on your passport and this is something that you need to sign! Instead of simply stamping and allowing you to enter their country, they make you take a pledge, right in your passport, and sign that you agree to do right by the land you are visiting as a tourist. The pledge is the most creative and visible part of a larger effort that starts with an inflight film shown on all inbound flights, a multi-language passport brochure given to all tourists, airport posters, instructional signages around the country, and the legal power to enforce fines up to one million dollars for visitors who disobey the regulations. #creativity #creative #tourism #communications #ecology #environment #travel #marketing

Last week, I shared how the word “sustainability” is turning people off in travel and hospitality marketing. The response? Wow. Clearly, this hit a nerve. So here’s the natural next question: If the word is overused (or misunderstood), how do we communicate the mission without losing the message? Here’s what I recommend: 📌 Focus on the feeling, not the label. People want connection, authenticity, and meaningful experiences. Speak to that, not just certifications or jargon. 📌 Tell mini stories. Instead of saying “eco-conscious,” say: “Guests wake up to fresh eggs from our neighbour’s farm, and coffee that directly supports a women-led co-op in Colombia.” Let the details do the work. 📌 Mirror their values. Travelers may not say “I’m looking for a regenerative stay,” but they will say: “I want to go somewhere beautiful, local, and with a purpose behind it.” 📌 You don’t need to use the word sustainability to stand for it. In fact, when done right, your guests will feel it and talk about it, even if you never mention it once. Want to know more? Drop a comment or send me a message. I’m always up for a chat about doing good, in ways that actually resonate.

🌍 Exciting news! Booking.com, in collaboration with Accor and the University of Surrey, has unveiled a new study, "Engaging Travellers to Embrace More Sustainable Behaviours." Understanding the crucial role guests play in successfully getting the value out of sustainability initiatives implemented by the accommodation, Booking.com, Accor, and the University of Surrey have delved into the factors that build or diminish guest trust. Guests often exhibit skepticism about their role in supporting sustainability efforts. The research uncovers how effective messaging can overcome this skepticism and inspire sustainable behavior among travelers. Aiming to bridge the gap between intention and action, the paper provides valuable insights for the hospitality industry to enhance sustainable practices through refined communication strategies. This comprehensive research, conducted through in-depth interviews, diary studies, and lab-based behavioural experiments, provides actionable insights on how to effectively communicate sustainability to guests in the travel sector. 🌟 Key findings : 1. Highlight sustainability practices – including for less sustainable amenities – and show how guests can easily contribute 2. Balance appeals to pleasure and comfort for optimal results 3. Empower guests, don’t constrain or dictate to them 4. Help guests act as responsibly as they do at home By adopting these insights, hospitality providers can drive meaningful behaviour change, enhance guest experiences, and foster long-term loyalty, all while promoting a more sustainable future. 💡 Read the full report here: https://lnkd.in/ecg2j-AT 🚀 Read the press release here:  https://lnkd.in/e3p5ZVie #Sustainability #Travel #Hospitality #MoreSustainableTravel #BehaviourChange #BookingDotCom #Accor #UniversityOfSurrey

5000 travelers, 1 blind test. 50% said they’d choose sustainable transportation and lodging. But when past trips were reviewed, guess how many actually did? 11% 🤯 The gap between guest’s intention and action? Huge! PhocusWire’s study confirms what many of us know: most travelers don’t choose experiences based on sustainability. They just want a good time. Does that mean we stop talking about our responsible measures? Absolutely not. But instead of listing how many solar panels you have, focus on how your sustainability efforts add value. Ask yourself: ✅ Does your energy efficiency lower room rates? ✅ Do your tours offer a unique, community-driven experience guests can’t get elsewhere? ✅ Are your ingredients less toxic because they’re grown on a local organic farm? If so, that’s what guests need to hear. Before people care about why you do what you do, they need to understand what’s in it for them. And while they may not be actively looking for green options, reframing the message gives them real reasons to choose your business— while also making a responsible choice. For the record, I believe sustainability will eventually become the norm. But until then, we need to talk about it in a way that makes it matter to most. 👉🏾 How do you connect your responsible practices to guest experience? 👉🏾 What’s a sustainable feature in your business that guests rave about? P.S. If you want to learn more about how to communicate your sustainability brand message effectively, you’ll enjoy my newsletter, The Cultured Journal. Subscribe using the link below👇🏾

I met my inspiration at NY Climate Week and the insights she dropped will shape my work for years. Solitaire Townsend shared something uncomfortable: we've been telling the same "running out of time" story for longer than some activists have been alive. After decades at Futerra studying storytelling, here's the truth → Stories are 22 times more likely to be remembered than facts. Yet we keep managing data instead of managing emotion. Three narrative killers plague climate stories: → Sacrifice – telling people they must give up everything → Agency – making people feel powerless → Fatalism – convincing young people (up to 50%) that we're doomed When she started in the '90s, renewable energy was a joke—"what a few weirdos in California did." Now it's cheaper than fossil fuels. The story changed. The world changed. But we're STILL stuck at the inciting incident without moving forward. That's not how society changes. Society changes through punctuated equilibrium. Everything stays the same, then everything changes at once. We're at that moment. Here's what we miss: people engage with climate differently. After testing across markets from China to the US to Europe, Futerra identified three psychographic groups in your boardrooms and buying committees: GREENS (systems-first) → Push lifecycle TCO, Scope 1-3 cuts, resilience scores. Want credible roadmaps, open data and predictive impact metrics. What stalls them: short-termism and vendor lock-in GOLDS (societal-status focused) → Ask "What are peers doing?" Need recognizable logos, benchmarks, case studies. Move on what will make them look good internally and externally What stalls them: jargon and unclear immediate value. BRICKS (pragmatic operators) → Need <18-month payback, concrete playbooks, role-level wins. Track OPEX cuts and cycle time. What stalls them: Vague benefits and unclear ROI The tragedy is that Greens and Bricks fight each other. Greens push systems thinking; Bricks demand immediate ROI. Both try to convert Golds, who follow momentum. The insight: Stop trying to make every stakeholder Green. Your buying committee has all three. Your roadmap needs to speak to all three. If we change the story, we can change the world. We are homo narrativus : the storytelling ape. It's time we acted like it. -- Looking to tell effective stories for GTM in Climate? Check the pinned comment.

There was a time I believed numbers spoke for themselves—until I learnt how quickly they fade from our memory. For example, only 0.5% of the world’s water is drinkable. Hard to picture, right? Now imagine all the world’s water as a jug of water with a single ice cube at the top. The only drinkable portion? Just the tiny drops melting off the ice cube’s edges. That image sticks—which is exactly why framing numbers as stories makes all the difference. This technique isn’t just useful for environmental data. Years ago, The New York Times used it to highlight gender inequality in corporate leadership. Rather than simply stating the percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs who are women, they framed it in a way that made the disparity unforgettable: Among Fortune 500 CEOs, there are more men named James than there are women. Now here’s a take on what has dominated our feeds all week. DeepSeek was trained on 15 trillion tokens. That’s an impossible number to grasp and meaningless for many. But here’s context: if every person on Earth wrote a unique 1,500-word essay, that’s how many words went into training this LLM. Isn’t it suddenly tangible? I believe this same principle can revolutionise our everyday business intelligence. Imagine a contextualisation engine—a layer built on top of BI tools that translates metrics into perspectives that are easy to recall. For example, instead of merely listing a 1% churn rate, what if the engine frames it like this?: For every 1,000 customers we gain this quarter, 100 of our existing ones will leave. Imagine a full theatre of paying customers vanishing overnight. What if we could save just 20 of them? That would mean an extra X in revenue. With better translation, fact retention would improve, metrics will easily be recalled by many and inclusivity would grow - Data would no longer be an exclusive language! -------- In writing this I was inspired by the principles and examples outlined in the book, Making Numbers Count by Chip Heath and Karla Starr.

How do we make climate communication resonate with the very people it affects the most? 💡 🌎 In my latest essay for Question of Cities, I reflect on this pressing question, drawing on my experience in journalism and storytelling, as well as research and fieldwork in the climate space over the last few years. The article outlines how dominant climate narratives often remain inaccessible, overly technical, and disconnected from everyday lived realities. Some key takeaways: 🔁 1. Translation isn’t enough—localisation matters. Efforts like the UNDP Climate Dictionary are welcome, but we need to go further. People don’t say “Jalvayu Parivartan”—they talk about rain delays, changing festivals, and crop failures. Climate terms must emerge from how people experience change, not how we define it. Climate must be framed as an everyday issue. For most people in India, climate change competes with daily concerns like food, housing, and livelihoods. 📚 2. Storytelling enables agency. We need to shift from policy briefs to bottom-up storytelling, where a fisherwoman in the Sundarbans or a tribal woman in Odisha becomes the knowledge holder. 🎭 3. Embrace diverse media and people’s science. From metaphor-rich language to theatre, dance, and music—creative formats hold emotional and cultural power. Even community-defined terms like “wet drought” offer nuance and should shape climate adaptation strategies. 📰4. Mainstream media must build capacity. At a recent workshop in Maharashtra, we saw how rural reporters struggle to differentiate between climate and weather. There’s little support for them—especially women—to cover these stories. Climate needs to be integrated into all beats, not confined to disaster or weather coverage. 🎯 5. Climate communications is not just outreach—it’s strategy. Too often, communication is underfunded and under-prioritised. But to build inclusive, impact-driven programmes, we must invest in grassroots media literacy, storyteller training, and long-term behavioural change campaigns. 🌏 In the coming years, we will witness a growing wave of efforts to communicate climate change in new and compelling ways as climate becomes centre stage in policy and mainstream narratives. But the real test of these approaches won’t lie in international recognition or polished campaigns. It will lie in how meaningfully they resonate on the ground—in how a coal worker in Jharkhand or a landless labourer in Maharashtra understands, imagines, and navigates a world that is 1.5 degrees C warmer. 🔗 Read the piece here: https://lnkd.in/dGG8ZNZn A big thanks to Smruti Koppikar and Shobha Surin for trusting me with this piece. And of course, this would not be possible without Asar and all the fabulous work that I have got to be a part of in the last 3+ years! #ClimateCommunication #ClimateJustice

🚀 Brands are still doing the work to be more sustainable and resilient, because it makes good business sense. But at The Cool Down, we’ve watched companies grapple with how to communicate the work that consumers want and investors demand. So this #ClimateWeekNYC, TCD and Zeno Group brought together key leaders across industries for some real talk instead of talking points, collaboration instead of competition, and community building to create confidence, so we can move faster and farther, together. Some key takeaways of our discussion: 🔎 Alison DaSilva from Zeno: The reality is that a large majority of companies are risk-averse right now. They're cautious that what they say could be taken out of context, or that they’ll alienate customers around some of these topics. ▶️ Solution: Take a data-driven, audience-centric approach to communication strategies. Don’t be afraid to speak, but be prepared for potential risks. Prioritize progress over perfection. 🔕 Alexander Habib from L'Oréal: With so many campaigns and slogans and detailed reports on products, the consumer is often left with an off-putting jumble of jargon, even if(!) the products are actually more sustainable. ▶️ Solution: Don’t stop speaking, but say less. Figure out how to simplify your message for the consumer so that it’s immediately understandable and accessible. The art of communication is prioritization. 🐶 Joanne Dwyer from PetSmart: Leading with the sustainability benefits isn't as effective as connecting with customers’ lifestyles: how can brands make it easier to help people make better choices? ▶️ Solution: Illustrate the tangible health benefits of products upfront (improved coat and skin, digestive improvements, good taste etc), and use sustainability (minimally processed, cleaner ingredients) as the follow-up. ✈️ Sanju Luidens with Aruba Tourism Authority: Travelers are looking for sustainable solutions, but they don’t know what works and where to find them. In fact, 73% of travelers say they want to learn how to make a positive impact, but only 23% feel they've been shown how. ▶️ Solution: Create guidelines and actions for visitors to take. For example, Aruba has created the Aruba Promise with easy to achieve actions for guests to follow. It also provides tangible examples of hope and a reason to come back. Thanks to Alison DaSilva Katy Bozich Amanda Perlin (Pryor) for collaborating on another great event, together, and to Charlotte Salley for helping me to rep The Cool Down. #climateweeknyc #communication #sustainability

Want to break through climate apathy? Try this 👇 We have a name for what causes apathy: Boiling Frog Syndrome 🐸🔥 We adapt to slow change, even when it's dangerous. That’s what makes climate communication so hard. But this new study (published in @Nature Human Behaviour and shared by Katharine Hayhoe) offers a clue to help us get across exactly how hot the water we’re in is.. Researchers tested how people responded to the *same* climate data - presented in two different ways: 📈 A gradual temperature rise, or; ⚫️ A binary: Did the lake freeze this year, or not? The second version hit twice as hard. Participants perceived the impact of of the change to be more than double the size. Why? Because binary visuals made the change feel more abrupt - and more urgent. This helps counteract the human experience of 'shifting baselines': We judge what’s “normal” by the last 2-8 years. So slow trends don’t feel like crises. If you work with climate data - try showing clear thresholds: ❌ “Things are getting warmer”. ✅ But: “This lake used to freeze. Now it doesn’t.” 🧠 Simple doesn’t mean simplistic - it means seen. 👉 Let’s get creative, what’s one piece of climate data you could present this way? -- Sources in the comments 🤓

Last week, someone who’s been working in climate communications for over a year quietly admitted they still didn’t totally understand what “lowering emissions” meant. Not the general vibe of it, but the actual why and how. I loved their honesty. It reminded me how often specialists in the space continue to throw around terms that even insiders don’t fully grasp. If we want the public, policymakers, and private sector to act, we have to stop communicating like we’re at a scientific conference. Here are 5 tools I use all the time to make complex climate and science ideas land: ✔️ The “Grandma Test” Can you explain the concept to your grandma without losing meaning? This test forces clarity without condescension—and it’s one of the fastest ways to reveal jargon you didn’t even know you were using. ✔️ Metaphor as a Bridge Metaphors are powerful shortcuts for understanding. For example, instead of saying “emissions reductions,” try: “Imagine your home has a slow gas leak. Cutting emissions is like finding and sealing that leak—before it gets worse.” It may take longer to say (a communications faux pas) but we process metaphors faster than data. ✔️ Chunk the Concept Break big ideas into bite-sized parts: What is it? Why does it matter? What can be done? Who’s doing it well? This format creates digestible flow and gives your audience mental “hooks” to follow you. ✔️ Visual Storytelling Not every concept needs a paragraph. Sometimes it just needs a sketch, a diagram, or a comparison chart. ✔️ Mirror the Audience Before I write or say anything, I ask: “What does this audience care about most?” Meeting people in their worldview is half the battle. I’ll be sharing more of the frameworks and strategies I use in future posts—but if your team is trying to translate climate science or sustainability language into something people actually understand and act on, C3 can help. Let’s make it make sense. 👉 Feel free to reach out or follow along for more tools from the Climate Communications Collective playbook.