Charting a New Course With Rupert Read
This episode features a conversation with Rupert Read, co-director of The Climate Majority Project. It was recorded in March 2025.
Rupert is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, and at the Climate Majority Project, works to build a mass, moderate climate movement by supporting community-led adaptation, democratic participation, and practical climate action across the UK.
He’s the author of several influential books on climate and society, and is a frequent commentator on the likes of the BBC, Al Jazeera, and other major platforms.
His latest book, Transformative Adaptation: Another world is still just possible, argues that we are now beyond the safe climate threshold and must bring adaptation to the centre of our response — not as retreat, but as an opportunity for deep change.
Transformative Adaptation offers a framework for reimagining how we live, work, and govern in the face of climate impacts. It champions localism, community resilience, and working with nature, while challenging dominant systems that are no longer fit for purpose.
Amongst other things, Rupert and I discussed how communicators can help audiences meet the realities of our current predicament with active hope and a sense of agency, which actions and interventions need to be taken and how we can support them, and what the concept of “thrutopia” offers for imagining what it all might look like.
Additional links:
Get Rupert’s book Transformative Adaptation: A new world is still just possible
Check out Rupert’s website
The Climate Majority Project website
Some words from Rupert on Thrutopia
Article with Caroline Lucas about climate populism
Dickon: Hi and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a podcast dedicated to helping you do exactly that. I'm Dickon and I'll be your host as we dig deep into the best practises and the worst offences, always looking for ways to help you - and me - improve our abilities to engage, empower and ultimately activate audiences on climate related issues.
This episode features a conversation with Rupert Read, co-director of the Climate Majority Project. It was recorded in March 2025.
Rupert is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia, a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, and at the Climate Majority Project works to build a mass, moderate climate movement by supporting community-led adaptation, democratic participation, and practical climate action across the UK. He's the author of several influential books on climate and society, and is a frequent commentator on the likes of the BBC, Al Jazeera and other major platforms.
His latest book, Transformative Adaptation: Another world, is still just possible, argues that we are now beyond the safe climate threshold and must bring adaptation to the centre of our response. Not as a retreat, but as an opportunity for deep change.
Transformative adaptation offers a framework for reimagining how we live, work, and govern in the face of climate impacts. It champions localism, community resilience, and working with nature while challenging dominant systems that are no longer fit for purpose.
Amongst other things, Rupert and I discussed how communicators can help audiences meet the realities of our current predicament with active hope and a sense of agency, which actions and interventions need to be taken and how we as communicators can support them, and what the concept of Thrutopia offers for imagining what it all might look like.
So, let's get on with it. This is Communicating Climate Change with Rupert Read.
From your perspective, how can communication best contribute in humanity's response to the climate crisis?
Rupert: So, communication is obviously absolutely crucial. Well, I say obviously because it should be obvious that unless we get the majority of people basically on side with this, we don't get to get anywhere serious on it. This is not like, for example, nuclear weapons or the ozone layer, both of which with respect to it, was possible, at least in principle, and has been done to some extent, right, to tackle them on a basically kind of elite level. Climate saturates and is saturated by everybody's life. So this is the fundamental premise really, of the Climate Majority Project, of which I'm the co-director, that unless we are serious about reaching most people, about getting the majority of people, actually on board, then we're not even in the game. And that implies directly that communications is absolutely essential. But before we start to get into what the implications of that are and how we can communicate well and so forth, I want to say something a little bit stark. Which is that I think that so far we have basically fundamentally failed to communicate climate change and I don't think this is admitted often enough. I think too many people are still in the game of saying, “oh, you know, we're getting some really good tactics and strategies together and we're reaching people and let's stay positive and you've got to tell a positive story,” and so forth.
In the Climate Majority Project, we think that's all basically bunkum. And then you can see it. It's bunkum. If you just open your eyes to the world as it is today, a world where possibly still the world's most powerful man is claiming he doesn't even believe in the thing. Although of course he's still building higher sea walls at his golf range in Scotland. But you get my meaning, we are in a situation where climate policy, climate diplomacy, and I would say climate communications, have basically fundamentally failed.
Of course, they haven't completely failed. You know, we've got wonderful things to point to, like the Paris Agreement. We've got some real progress in decarbonisation in many countries around the world. If we hadn't done anything effectively, we would be in an even worse situation now than the one we are in fact in. But we need to admit that the situation that we are in is pretty damn desperate, because if we don't admit that, we won't actually get serious about changing up. And that's exactly what we need to do in numerous ways that I'm sure we're going to discuss on this podcast.
Dickon: Your new book, Transformative Adaptation: Another world, is still just possible, it centres around the concept of transformative adaptation, or TrAd. What can you tell us about this concept and how do you see it contributing to the broader landscape of climate action?
Rupert: So let me segue into that from what I said in response to your first question. Unless we admit that climate politics and climate communications have basically on balance fundamentally failed so far, then we are not going to be willing to get serious about what is increasingly emerging as the lived reality of the climate question, and I'm talking about climate impacts, right?
So far, too much of our discourse and too much of our attention has been on the idea that we can combat the colourless, odourless gas by some point in the future by decarbonizing our systems and that if we all do that and we all just pull together, then everything's going to be fine.
But guess what? Everything is not fine. In real time, it's possible for more and more people to see that. And there is a climate majority that is already extant, that is seeing it all around the world, polls are very clear about that. But that majority needs to be deepened. It needs to be helped to process the difficult truth. It needs to be activated. And, crucially, that activation we are saying, at the Climate Majority Project, is really only going to occur if we actually begin where people are, if we begin with their cost of living, if we begin with their actual lived experience of climate impacts, and if we begin with their sense partly on the basis of those impacts - and also partly I should say, perhaps we'll come back to this on the basis of fictions, imaginative presentations of climate etcetera, which we need much more and better - on the basis of these things, people are potentially much readier than I think has has yet been understood to get serious about climate action.
But what we're saying is you have to actually begin with the impacts with the adaptation challenge and with the profound need now to build resilience at every level, including, crucially, community resilience. And we don't get to do that if we start off with the question of decarbonization as front and centre, and that is mainly what we have done in climate communications, etcetera, and climate policy, to date.
So the idea with transformative adaptation is, what if we start in this different place? What if we start with climate impacts? And what if we start to help people to become truly aware and fully aware, including in their lives, including in the way that they actually live together in communities and also at work etcetera, that the challenge of adapting to the climate damage that is already here and the significantly worse damage that is already for certain in the pipeline, is the place to start and is something that they can meaningfully tackle.
The really exciting thing when you go in with adaptation is that it is more local to people. It is more present to people. If people act on it, if people act on impacts that have been received, impacts that are definitely to come, impacts that are potentially to come, they can see the benefits in the relatively short to medium term and the benefits accrue in significant part to them and not just equally to everybody in the whole world. These are facts that need to be leveraged for all they are worth by people in climate because we are in so much trouble.
The key thing about transformative adaptation is that it goes beyond the first kind of basic form of adaptation which people resort to when they start to get worried about climate impacts. And that form of adaptation, which is mostly what we've had to date insofar as we've had any action and discourse on adaptation, is what we call reactive adaptation or defensive adaptation. So, to give an example, it's things like building higher sea walls and building higher hard flood defences and so forth. The idea with transformative adaptation and also the term which we now use typically for this in the Climate Majority Project, which is strategic adaptation, we think the idea of strategic adaptation has various advantages, including appealing more to policy wonks, politicians, et cetera.
The idea with transformative or strategic adaptation is you've got to look beyond the immediate defensive impulse to adapt if you're actually gonna adapt effectively. So carrying on the example I gave a a second ago, if you just build hard higher flood defences then, A. What you're doing is it's self high carbon, so you're ultimately making the trouble worse. B. You're not getting anywhere close to the source of the trouble. Of course, a lot of the source of the trouble is in carbon emissions themselves. That's ultimately where we have to get to. But the way we get there, I'm saying, we're saying, is by way of saying, “Look, let's think about this a bit more holistically. Let's think about this more strategically. Let's look upstream.”
So for instance. If you actually want to stop cities, towns, et cetera from being flooded, then you need to create sponge cities. You need to create surfaces that are permeable you need to create swales and much more vegetation, etcetera, in the cities themselves and upstream from them. You've got to look at upland land management. You've got to look at restoring peak lands and wetlands. This is the systemic strategic version of adaptation, which can actually potentially work. And ultimately, what this is going to be about is, well, quite significantly changing the way that we live in all sorts of respects. We're gonna have to live more lightly on the earth. We're gonna have to live more locally. We're going to have to live in ways that are obviously not so high carbon. Transformative adaptation is a frame for putting all of these things together.
Transformative adaptation or tread for short emphasises the fact that the way that we're going to live is going to have to transform if we are actually gonna get through this. If all you do is simply try to adapt reactively and defensively, you're just trying to keep the current system staggering forward a while longer. What you're doing is fragile. Eventually it's going to fail. So shallow reactive defensive adaptation alone is worse than nothing. Only in the context of a transformative and strategic approach which ultimately looks to change our way of living to a way that is actually better as well as being able to be sustained. Only in the context of such an approach, can reactive or defensive adaptation measures be justified. And indeed, sustained.
So that's transformative adaptation in a nutshell, it's a win, win, win. It's looking to change our way of life to a way of life that will actually be better. I mean, we'll feel better as well as literally being better. So, you know, we're talking about more local food. We're talking about greater food resilience, food that you can trust, food that you have a hand in, food that tastes better, food that is lower carbon. We're talking about more sustainable local water resources and water husbandry, you know, which begins with basic things in the home like grey water systems, water butts, etcetera, but needs to go way further than that in ways I've already gestured to. We're talking, as I say, about a more localised future. This is a key element of what's in the book, and actually that's a lot of what people crave.
You know what people really want in our atomised, divided society is a future in which they can have more genuine community again. And they're great good fortune is that, like it or not, that is what they're going to get. And if we do it right, they'll really like it. We'll really like it.
Just to give a tiny example from my own village. Since we moved here 3 1/2 years ago, my wife and I have been instrumental, along with others in bringing about a five mile network, which is small and nascent, but is getting somewhere. In this five mile network what we do is we meet monthly, and sometimes more often, and trade seeds and produce and plants and tips and thoughts about the kinds of things that need to change in the community that we can do bottom up and that also need political attention, etcetera.
And the idea of the five mile network is it's within a five mile radius that we need to actually increasingly find our resilience and build community etcetera. What we've also done over the last 18 months is co-create a community orchard, so we're we're getting a load of fruit and nut trees in and you know, when we created the orchard, on the day we created it, 100 people turned up to plant the trees. This is in a village of 1000 people. That's 10% of the entire village turned out on a cold day to do something which, you know did not involve them getting any money or presents or anything. It just involved them planting trees. There were so many people who turned up that we had to kind of turn people away in the end and say look, “I'm sorry all the trees are now planted. You'll have to come back when we do the next tranche of planting.” Right?
So that's what I'm saying. There is a real hunger for this and this is how we can justify the subtitle of the book. I started off by saying, look, we've fundamentally failed so far. We're in absolutely desperate trouble. But another world is still just possible and we think that part of the way, a crucial foundational part of the way, is if there is a strategic pivot to beginning with impacts, beginning with adaptation, looking to build resilience, bringing adaptation and mitigation and decarbonization together in the ways I've started to describe, and that's how you generate active hope from out of the appalling situation that we're in.
Dickon: I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Devon, so this is… What you're describing is what life used to be like, but now is not there anymore.
Rupert: Exactly. Let me tell you a tiny anecdote. Just the other day I had lunch with an old boy in the village here. He's lived here all his life. He's now in his early 80s and he was describing to me the life that he had when he was a child. Like most families in the village they grew basically all their own vegetables. They didn't have TV until he was in his early teens. And then I asked him this question. “How do you compare the life that we have now to the life that you had then, which would you prefer?” And he answered straight away, he said, “Ohh, absolutely life was better then, because we had much more solid community. Because we knew that we could rely on people in the village to supply each other mutually with nearly everything that we needed. Because we had much more freedom than kids do nowadays. Because we had much less pressure and anxieties, among other things, the ecological anxieties that folks have nowadays,” he said, “without a shadow of a doubt, I prefer the life as as I used to live it.”
Now we're not going to go back to that past, the key thing to do is to see what we can harvest and keep going from the culture that we've built that can last, that we want to last and what we can and need to regain, and there's a lot of stuff that we can and need to regain, which will actually enrich our lives and rebuild a lot of those things that we are horribly missing and that, for example, are at the root of the massive mental ill health epidemic that is sweeping our societies, and especially perhaps sweeping our young people.
Dickon: The idea that mitigation alone is no longer enough will be, for better or for worse, a heavy realisation for many. How can we Communicate this in a way that fosters action rather than despair?
Rupert: Yeah, great question and this is present in our book on transformative adaptation. It's also very, very present in the work that we're now doing in the Climate Majority Project on this under the heading of strategic adaptation, in our campaign Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience, which the very observant among you will notice, abbreviates nicely to SAFER, which is what we need to become and what we can become if we go down this path.
So look, the crucial starting point here is that, as you implied, the key reason, probably the single biggest reason, why we've gone so slow on adaptation to date, why adaptation has been, and remains, the poor relation. Why, for example, in the UK, the Committee on Climate Change, which excoriates the government record regularly on decarbonisation, doubly excoriates the government record on adaptation as even worse.
The key reason for this, in our view, and this will be very present in the report on strategic adaptation for emergency resilience that will be coming out in a couple of months time from the Climate Majority Project. The key reason is that when you start to admit. That climate policy and climate activism and so forth to date, have, on balance, fundamentally failed. When you start to face up to the need for adaptation, when you start to do adaptation, then you can't any longer pretend that everything's gonna be OK, because when you start to take adaptation seriously, you're admitting that things are already not OK and that they're going to get worse. When you start to practise presilience and to plan for future potential disasters, etcetera, you are admitting that we are deep in the danger zone. And that's what most of us most of the time, don't really want to admit, right?
So there's a kind of fundamental social psychological point here. The pivot to adaptation is one that people are motivated to resist. But there is also at least one massive upside to this, which is when you do start to get people taking adaptation seriously then, for exactly the same reason, they are starting to engage with reality and they are getting out of the kind of dreamland which, for example the so-called stubborn optimists are sadly far too often still in. And frankly, you know, virtually all of our politicians and even, you know, a heroic figure like Head of the the UN and Antonio Gutierrez, he is, to my mind, starting to sound increasingly kind of strained in the way that he says on the one hand, “look, we're in desperate, desperate trouble.” He talks about global boiling, which I think is a rather kind of excessive metaphor, even for me. I don't like that metaphor. So he's trying to really kind of scare people and motivate people. But at the same time also, “oh, yeah, but it's going to be OK we can stay below 1.5°, we can do it all.” No, you have to let go of the fantasy that we can stay below 1.5°, which we are already above, basically.
You have to embrace adaptation and people are disinclined to do that. But when they do it, it has enormous power. So now to come directly to your question, how do we make it easier for people to do that? How do we make it easier for them to embrace the adaptation agenda? How do we make it easier for them to let go of the hopes which are no longer going to be realisable? There's a number of things to say here.
One is that a key element, and I've already been touching on this pretty heavily right, is you need to sell this as what is on balance a better life. If there was a massive shift towards transformative and strategic adaptation, which is of course very unlikely, but is entirely possible and becomes in a certain sense more possible every day as more and more people realise the trouble that we're in, etcetera. If we were to have a massive shift towards transformative and strategic adaptation then people would be getting to know their neighbours more and they would be physically fitter and healthier.
Every day, pretty much, I do an hour on our land here. We're lucky enough to have acquired ourselves 1/3 of an acre, which I can tell anybody is absolutely plenty. Arguably more than enough. On which we grow a lot of biodiversity and a lot of food. I mean, really, a lot. And, you know, it's incredibly satisfying and it keeps you fit and it keeps you much more mentally healthy than you would be otherwise. And we regularly sit around the campfire, maybe sing some songs or something with some neighbours or having a drink, etcetera, etc. You know, this is the kind of life that human beings are actually supposed to have. They're not supposed to be chained to their computers 24/7. They're not supposed to be mainlined into social media or constantly engaging in long commutes, or, for that matter, constantly engaging in long foreign holidays. None of these things are actually the way that we are programmed and the way that we work the best. So that's the first kind of big part of my direct answer to your question. If there are advertisers, et cetera, listening to this podcast, part of what we need to do that we really haven't done yet, partly because we've been so stuck in fantasies of an everlasting consumer society, which people can now see is not gonna last and actually is making people miserable anyway, once we get beyond that kind of fantasy, we need to start getting into a much better what I call a thrutopian imaginary. In other words, we're trying to stop dystopia, but we're not creating a utopian fantasy either. We're saying we gotta get through what is coming in the best possible way. We need to build the thrutopia, or many thrutopias, which involve people having better lives, lives that are simultaneously and deliberately adapting and adapted to the damage that is here and the worst damage that is coming. And if you do that, if we really manage to start doing that, then even as things get materially harder, which they are virtually certain to do over the next generation, we can have better lives.
And that leads into the second thing I want to say in response to your question, which is a question of meaning, you know, we've already touched a little on the way that so many people have a a big absence of a sense of meaning in their lives. You know, people talk about a God-shaped hole. There's rich conversations we can have about the kind of ways in which meaning needs to be restored. But a simple place to start is, a big way to supply meaning to our lives is to find meaning in seeking to survive and flourish through what is coming at us and that's what people do in natural disasters. That's what they do in unnatural disasters. That's what they do often, quite surprisingly, to some people, in wars. You know, for example, I think it's really important to remember that the suicide rate in the Second World War in the UK and in other places as well, fell, at a time when people were under extreme pressure and literally, you know, bombs falling around them, etcetera, losing loved ones, the suicide rate fell. Why? Well, the most plausible hypothesis is because people had a sense of purpose, a sense of common purpose, and that's what we need. And this awesome and awful crisis can provide that. So that leads into the thought that a key part of the communications challenge is to build and reinforce and deepen that sense purpose.
There's a particularly important role here, as we implied earlier, for creatives, and especially artists, imagineers, philosophers, systems, thinkers, writers, film makers, anyone who is in the business of creating, among other things, visions of how the future could be and what a genuinely better life could be. Including a more meaningful life.
Read a book like Stephen Markley's The Deluge or The End We Start From, also a wonderful film, and you get a sense of this. And these are both very recent works. You know, this is hardly happened yet. So this is one of the things I spend some of my time doing is working with artists, dramatists, etcetera, helping them to imagine and co-create thrutopias, visions of how our future could be. Not some perfect world, which is now completely impossible if it ever was possible, but a world which, as I was saying a few minutes ago could actually be better than what we have, even though it will be materially more constrained.
As the philosopher Nietzsche understood, we human beings profoundly need meaning and we can turn suffering too into meaning. If we are given the right kind of frames for it. So that's a big communication challenge, but I think it's one which, well, let's put it this way, it could give a real sense of meaning to a lot of advertisers, et cetera, who at present perhaps maybe lacking one.
Dickon: Guilty as charged. That's how I found mine!
With its focus on localism and community power, as well as its critique of dominant systems of governance, there are some areas where TrAd intersects with the emergent idea of climate populism.
Do you see potential overlaps and if so, how could communicators ensure the TrAd message remains constructive and solutions oriented rather than fall into populism's more divisive tendencies?
Rupert: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. So one thing we should put in the show notes is the link to the article that Caroline Lucas and I penned recently in the New Statesman, on what we are calling “climate popularism”. So let me say a little bit about how I envisage that which is completely in line with what we've been talking about so far.
So, with climate popularism we're saying. Yeah, look, you've got to start where people are. You've got to start with impacts with cost of living with co-benefits, et cetera, with quality of life, if you do that, then we can transform the perception of the climate question and we can start to potentially regain some ground which has been lost to so-called populist agendas, largely, of course, on the hard right or far right, also integral to the climate popularist vision, as Caroline and I seek to present it, as well as this beginning really from strategic and transformative adaptation, is the sense that, as you say, Dickon, a crucial thing that we need to do is not have popularism devolve into divisiveness, because this goes back to where we started this whole conversation.
We need to actually get a long term sustained majority, maybe even super majority, on board. It's not enough to get like 35% of people, you know, voting for the right policies in an election if they're just gonna be reversed at the next election. So this is a really huge ask. It's profoundly difficult. But if it's ever gonna be in any significant degree achieved, it's going to be achieved partly because we succeed in finding common ground, or because we succeed in shifting the whole agenda. So part of the objective of the Climate Majority Project, and this is why, among other things, much more than some other organisations or movements in the space, we work with conservatives and are willing to speak way outside the climate bubble or the so-called progressive bubble, part of the agenda of the Climate Majority Project has been to work with conservatives because we recognise that unless you're able to talk to people who identify themselves as being on the right, then you're never going to achieve this actual majority, and you know, it's very interesting if you look at the work, for example of George Marshall, who's an adviser of ours, and Climate Outreach, then you see that there are significant percentages of people who identify themselves as being on the political right who do care about ecology and nature and climate. For example, there's the so-called loyal nationals, many of whom are very patriotic, some of whom are at the moment in the UK thinking of voting for Reform UK, but who don't agree at all with Reform UK's policies on climate and are actually just looking for an approach which is gonna be more appealing to them. So what we're saying is that climate popularism needs to be that approach, and that's partly about, you know, good slogans and good comms and so forth, which, you know, maybe there's some listeners who can help us with. Do feel free to get in touch with us through my website or the CMP website. And it's partly about this deliberate, determined effort to be depolarizing and to actually be welcoming in a way that, to be honest, historically the climate movement hasn't been particularly good at being. So yeah, that's the the germ of my answer to this crucial question that you've asked. If we are serious about getting through this, then we're going to be serious about learning some tricks from the populists.
We're not just going to say Trump and Farage are completely evil and everything they are for, we are against, and vice versa. We're going to notice, for example, that some of their appeal has been on the basis of rejecting an extreme vision of identity politics. And they've had that appeal successfully because that extreme vision of identity politics is not popular. And we'll notice that the case for the rejection of all tariffs has not been well made and that most people around the world are not convinced that neoliberalism is working for them, that the dogma of endless economic growth is working for them, that global free trade-ism is working for them. They don't believe that, and frankly, they're right not to believe it.
So we need to be willing to look more carefully and more open-mindedly at some of these things. We need to look beyond the progressive activist demographic which cleaves absolutely to dogmas around identity politics, around open borders, vis a vis immigration. We need to reject the technocratic consensus around endless free trade, which assumes, for example, that a so-called trade war is inevitably, entirely a bad thing. I’m not, you know, giving you a detailed policy manifesto here. I'm just saying, let's have these conversations, right.
We need to be ready to impose tariffs on the basis of workers rights on the basis of environmental protection on the basis of carbon border adjustment, etcetera. These kinds of things should be within the wheelhouse of a potential climate popularist approach. And so those are some examples of how we may be able to actually, eventually, I'm not saying this gonna happen overnight, and there's gonna be a lot of suffering in the meantime, and therefore, you know, again, a deep need for adaptation, but eventually reach a point where we actually do have a majority fully on board. I mean activated. And where political parties, rather than running away from climate as too many are doing at the moment, will be running towards it, because they'll be aware that unless they do so, they're going to lose.
Dickon: What's the single-most important aspect of communication that we should be paying attention to in our climate communication endeavours?
Rupert: Gosh, well, it's obviously always tricky to just pick out one thing. I guess if you really forced me to, I would say that we need to proceed on the basis that most people are unpersuaded. I don't mean by that to deny what I asserted earlier, which is true, that there is already a climate majority. What I mean, people are unpersuaded about is the urgency of this, the tractability of it, the potential for them to find their agency in relation to it, and this comes to the Climate Majority Project theory of change, which says that, a crucial, neglected part of building the agency that we need is building collective awareness, is building collective awareness that there already is a climate majority is building collective awareness through engaging in adaptational activities together, that as a way in which people can actually do stuff, and it needs to be there also on the level of culture, which comes back to the the need for far more through thrutopian fiction, creative work, etcetera, it needs to be in the national conversation in the international conversation, there needs to be a buzz around it. So yeah, I think that would be the place I would start.
Most people are unpersuaded but it is possible to persuade them if one takes seriously the multiple dimensions on which it's necessary to get people engaged. It's not enough to just give people the truth. That can just disengage them if the truth seems overwhelming. They have to be able to process that truth together, which is part of what we seek to to offer through our climate courage work, for example.
It's not enough to just undertake action. The action has to be there against the background of sufficient understanding of the need for and the urgency of the action. And there has to be a sense of there are other people already engaging in this action. So part of what we're trying to do in the CMP is to grow this sense of, “You're part of something huge and wide and inevitable and growing, in common with people who you might think you have very little in common with,” and in some ways you'd be right. You know, we work with top corporate lawyers, we work with people who are engaging in building resilience from the ground up in Brexit voting communities and many more things besides. These people might seem to be very, very disparate, but what they have in common is that they all recognise actually we need to act on this, we can act on this and if we act on this, it will actually make our lives better as well as being the ethically right thing to do.
Dickon: Conversely, what's the biggest mistake you see communicators make when attempting to engage the public on climate change issues?
Rupert: Well, here I come back to where we started and I would say that there has to be more willingness to be courageous and innovative in our communications.
There are too many people in the climate comm world in the climate policy world, etcetera, who are still caught up in a narrative of “you have to tell people a positive story. We have to give people the sense that everything can be OK. It has to be about upsides, not downsides.” No, we're past that. What you have to do is actually find effective ways, which we've been talking about in this conversation and a lot of them begin with or go by the route of adaptation of the right kind, you have to find effective ways of enabling people to engage with the reality and to see the potential upside of down and to see the potential improvements in quality of life around this to see the ways in which just coming to terms with the reality itself can be a positive rather than a negative in the right context, right, given sociopsychological support, given the the tools to to do the job.
But yeah, the job is one of coming to terms with a reality which is difficult. One of the areas that applies most strongly is in relation to school kids. This is the basis of our climate courage campaign. School children need to be taught the truth, right? They need to be educated into the reality of the world they're moving into so they know, for example, whether they can assume that they're going to have a career in the in the normal way that their parents did. We need to talk truthfully to our kids, but the reason why many people haven't spoken truthfully to their kids at home or in the classroom is that they are understandably, completely scared of the way in which their kids will be scared if they hear the unvarnished truth. So children need to be resourced to take that truth, and that could mean various things. It could mean kind of peer support, could mean full on counselling. It could just mean that you get teachers who are well trained to deliver this stuff in the right way in a way that is empowering. For example, one of the things that we have evidence to support, is that if kids get the sense that their teachers and their parents care and are doing something about it, they find that enormously supportive and that shouldn't be too surprising. Right? But if people get to know that and get to act on that, that could make a big difference in enabling them to get beyond the understandable tendency to shy away from actually confronting the reality about the extinction crisis and possible difficult future scenario, really difficult future scenarios, vis a vis the climate.
So yeah, I would say the temptation to avoid is the temptation to avoid, right? The temptation to avoid is the temptation to avoid reality. To avoid the truth. And what one needs to do is to get into the business of engaging with the ways in which our future is gonna be tough but can be good as well.
A good comparison here is with the way that Winston Churchill, in the Second World War in the UK, did not say to people, “Don't worry. Everything's going to be fine,” he said, “I've got nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears and sweat,” and the British people rose to to that challenge and showed true grit.
It's going to be even harder this time, but that is the nature of the kind of approach that we need to take. That's the way that the communications challenge can turn into something wonderful and deliver the kind of active hope that we so badly need.
Dickon: It was fantastic talking to Rupert for this episode. But what in particular stuck with you from our conversation? What will you take from it and apply to your own work?
For me, it was Rupert’s straight talk about where we are right now. That there’s no avoiding the truth, but that that same truth is one we aren’t powerless to influence.
There’s a lot of chat about hope, optimism, and positivity in this climate communications sphere, and while on the one hand we know that climate communication that creates fear, overwhelm, and apathy isn’t great and certainly isn’t helpful, the same could be said for communications that leans too heavily in the other direction too. Treading a conscientious and strategic path forward in our outreach is essential as we walk the tightrope ahead.
Then, I loved the frankness with which Rupert talked about not regressing. Not going backwards. But taking the good stuff from the past and bringing it with us into the future. So often, discussions around systemic change or alternative economic designs offer a pretty bleak picture of life with less, rather than focusing on the great stuff that comes along with it. To build the groundswell we need, the climate majority, so to speak, the thrutopias we bring to bear for our audiences need to be appealing. And that’s a task where we climate communicators can help.
So, that’s what I’ll be taking with me. But how about you? What did you hear? What will you be incorporating into your communications endeavours?
Thanks to Rupert Read for sharing his time and insight with the show. It was great. You can find links to some relevant resources in the show notes.
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