Why did I start the Communicating Climate Change podcast?

At a recent event hosted by UN Climate Change, I was asked why I started the Communicating Climate Change podcast. I thought that it might be constructive to share those motivations here. So, you can either watch the event recording by hitting the image to the right, or find my three reasons for starting the podcast below.

Access to knowledge

I have a digital media background and more than a decade of experience working in digital marketing and communications. In that world, when you want to learn something, you look it up. You find a YouTube tutorial, you go to a forum and ask someone else who has more experience than you, or you listen to a podcast that goes in-depth to some aspect or other and gives you inspiration on how to develop your practice.

When I continued my studies in and around climate change and sustainability, I was shocked at the way access to that knowledge worked. It was always in some expensive book or locked behind a paywall. And even if you could get to it, half the time it was written or presented in a way that was pretty inaccessible anyway.

So, I wanted to help provide access to knowledge on how to better communicate climate change. And to do so in a format that might be more easily digested.

Types of knowledge

So many times through my education I was blasted with the word interdisciplinarity. This idea of bringing many strands of knowledge together to create something more comprehensive than its individual parts. But this only really seemed to legitimate scientific knowledge, across scientific fields. It seemed to ignore, or even deride, other types of knowledge, like that from the marketing world. So, obviously, that triggered me. I always thought that was a huge missed opportunity, especially as I started to see more and more research on communicating climate change that was coming to the same conclusions my marketing resources had come to years earlier.

So, I felt that any opportunity to bring other knowledge to the fore was a win. So the podcast was an opportunity to bring together best practices from all over the place and inspire one discipline with the findings from others. Real interdisciplinarity.

Because I knew how

I’d worked in music and radio in the past and enjoyed the format. It was something I knew how to do. I tried to find podcast resources on this topic and didn’t come across anything that achieved what I was looking for, so there also seemed to be a gap. And it was a great opportunity to bring a couple of my passions together. I thought I’d give it a go. And here we are.