Cultural differences in climate communication

Climate Communication Reimagined: Appealing Across Moral Foundations Recently, while working on energy transition scenarios for the Netherlands’ decarbonization by 2050 with TenneT, Jonathan Haidt’s insights from The Righteous Mind came sharply into focus. Full article: https://lnkd.in/gKQ4HfaQ Haidt research highlights six moral foundations — Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity, and Liberty — and argues that conservatives broadly use all six, while progressives strongly emphasize Care and Fairness. This explains why traditional climate messaging, dominated by progressive framing around harm prevention and fairness, struggles to resonate with broader audiences, especially conservatives. Effective climate advocacy requires blending messages to activate moral intuitions across this entire spectrum. For example, on clean energy jobs, progressives emphasize economic fairness, while conservatives focus on national strength and independence. A blended message: “Let’s revitalize America with clean energy, creating good jobs for all to keep our nation strong and independent.” On pollution, progressives speak to health impacts, conservatives to purity and national pride. Combining these, we get: “Cutting pollution protects our children's health and maintains America’s beautiful landscapes and clean air.” Framing climate change as a shared national challenge connects progressive concerns about global justice with conservative values around national security and heritage protection: “Protect our homeland from climate threats, safeguarding communities and the American way of life we cherish.” Even innovation and tradition can align: “Clean energy innovation continues America’s proud history of leadership, preserving the land and values we cherish for future generations.” In the Netherlands, debates around overhead transmission expansion benefit from similar messaging. Instead of purely technical arguments, framing transmission infrastructure as essential to national pride, heritage preservation, and economic vitality can resonate widely: “New transmission lines represent Dutch innovation, safeguarding our landscapes, health, and economy for generations.” I encountered this effective moral framing earlier while co-authoring Canada’s municipal guide for planned retreat amid climate risks. Communities rallied behind retreat initiatives when messaging emphasized collective good and community identity. European research, especially around Brexit, reinforces that messaging inclusive of national identity, sovereignty, and cultural integrity resonates more deeply than approaches limited to individual-focused morality. Ultimately, climate advocacy must leverage the full range of moral foundations to bridge divides and build broader consensus. Haidt’s framework is not only insightful, it’s essential for effective communication on climate and energy transitions.

We know that scholarship is not directly translatable, literally and figuratively, from language to language and culture to culture. But what does that mean specifically for Spanish and Portuguese-language climate change communication scholarship from Latin America? Bruno Takahashi, Iasmim A., and María Fernanda Salas explore the de-westernizing of communication studies to address the global threat of climate change in their new article in Environmental Communication, “Building Bridges: A Narrative Literature Review of Spanish and Portuguese-Language Climate Change Communication Scholarship from Latin America.” “In this narrative literature review, we consider these topics in Latin American research, but also take into account that Latin American communication research traditionally pushes against the dominant positivist North Atlantic communication perspective (Aparicio Cid, 2016). The evolving tradition of communication scholarship in Latin America differs from the Global North’s functionalist conceptualization of communication as a vehicle to achieve development. Instead, it examines communication, media, popular culture, and audiences as sites of power struggles framed within post-colonial contexts from a critical and cultural perspective (see, Murphy & Rodríguez, 2006; Rodríguez & Murphy, 1997). Research examining indigeneity, social movements, extractivism, territoriality, counter-hegemony, decoloniality, among others, foreground this Latin American communication research, and could therefore also characterize environmental communication, and more specifically, climate change communication research (Aparicio Cid, 2016).” -Takahashi, Amiden dos Santos & Fernanda Salas. Read this open-access article at https://lnkd.in/ggQ6PNS5

Individualism is a significant barrier to climate mitigation. We evaluated eleven behavioral interventions aimed at stimulating climate change mitigation, along cultural individualism and collectivism orientations in 63 countries (N=59,440). The more individualistic a nation, the less its residents believed in climate change, supported mitigation policy, and intended to share information (but it it was not related to tree planting in an online task). While some interventions were more effective in individualistic nations (decreasing psychological distance), and some in collectivistic nations (emphasizing social norms), others were effective in both (writing a letter to the future generation). These results reveal that and the efficacy of interventions hinges on cultural contexts. https://lnkd.in/gVW_Ay_e