Creating a Climate for Change With Susanne Moser
Episode 1
This episode of Communicating Climate Change features a conversation with decorated scientist, consultant, and all-round gem of a human, Susanne Moser. It was recorded in August 2022 and serves as a starting point for the series, taking a zoomed-out look at where we are right now and where we need to go when it comes to this pressing topic.
Susi’s resume is long and distinguished, but some highlights include her roles as Social Science Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment; as staff scientist for climate change at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and her contributions to several IPCC reports. Her work focuses on equitable adaptation and transformation in the face of climate change; on climate change communication in support of social change; and decision support and the interactions between scientists, policy-makers, and the public.
She’s also been responsible for a number of influential books, including as co-editor of the ground-breaking anthology on climate change communication, “Creating a Climate for Change”, alongside Lisa Dilling.
In fact, this book is exactly what led me to reach out to Susi in the first place and, as you’ll hear, had a real impact on me. It also provided a perfect jumping-off point for our conversation, which weaves through what’s still missing in a lot of communication around climate change, what communicators could do differently, and how technology has changed the game.
Additional links:
Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change
Show transcript:
CCC: It’s been 15 years since ‘Creating a Climate For Change’ was published, and yet we still seem to be struggling with many of the same barriers to progress on climate and social change issues. If the book came out today, what do you think would be different? What do we know now that we didn’t know then? And what areas of focus might have made their way into the pages that weren’t present in 2007?
SM: Yeah, such a good question. I guess what I would start with is that the first thing that I think is different now is that we have a climate change communication field that we didn’t have back then. There are hundreds and, I don’t know, thousands of people working on this topic and so there’s a lot more literature, there’s a lot more specific research out there. In many ways, maybe that’s an outcome of that early attempt that we started, 15 years ago, but it recognizes the importance of it. Back then we were still like, “This is important, you have to pay attention and do this right.” Now, at least people get that part. So, maybe we don’t have to do that persuasive task anymore.
We have built a field. Which is important. So, we probably would look for the best people who are now active in the field. We have a lot more literature but probably the most important thing is that the context is different. We’re doing this now when climate change action is even more urgent than it was back in that time. And, you know, just look outside the window or look into the newspapers in terms of what’s going on right now with drought in China, floods in Pakistan, those are the things we in our imagination put at the end of the century and here we are, 15 years later, and they are already present.
So, in 2005 we were still trying to work on making it real for people. Trying to get them to imagine this invisible thing. We don’t have that task now. It unfortunately has become all too real. And that raises some issues more to the forefront than back in that time.
Now we have to deal with people being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and awfulness of what’s happening and mind you, we’re still only at 1.1 degrees of global warming. So, we’re only at the beginning. So, how to deal with the emotional onslaught, the relentless onslaught of this topic, probably would be a bigger theme. My chapter back then was, “Beware of forgetting about emotions in climate communication.” Well, that would probably be the central part! Much more so than trying to explain the science or “Should we talk about weather or climate...” Those kinds of issues, I feel like we’ve gone beyond them.
Still, if you ask people if they can explain the difference, you probably would have to start again, at the beginning. I mean, it boggles the mind how even after 15 or 20 years of trying to do climate communication we’re still having some of the same challenges. I think people understand at some kind of background level, like a contextual level, “Yep, there’s this thing called climate change or global warming,” but when you dig deeper it’s like... What is it? What does it mean? How does it come about? People are still as superficially knowledgeable about those details as back then.
So, some issues are the same that we would have to address but the context, including the politicization and the polarization that has happened, certainly here in the US but also in other places, we would have to spend more time on that. And to try and understand it and have something to say about it. The issue now being much more present and the impacts simply present means we also have to talk about not just the communication of climate science but of the solutions.
What I would say is that the principles of good climate communication hold. I find it actually repeatedly astonishing that while we have inched on opinion data, and know a lot more, a lot of the science that has come out has confirmed the basics of what we came up with and that’s just the principles of good communication. Being very audience sensitive, trying to build trust and relationships so that people trust what they hear and can actually relate to it. Thinking about what motivates the audience that you’re talking to, and dealing with the barriers they face in making a change in response to your communication. Those issues stand as solidly as back then.
CCC: Well maybe that leads on nicely to the next question, which is how can communication facilitate the social changes necessary to mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the first place?
SM: Well, I guess maybe the way I want to answer that is: Imagine we all couldn’t speak. If we had no ways of communicating, not even non-verbally. Nothing would happen, right?
Communication, the exchange of information, whether it’s persuasion or whether it is storytelling, or along the entire spectrum of things that we convey - Emotions, impulses, whatever. If we didn’t have that, nothing would move. To me, communication is the software to, if you will, the hardware of everything we might do in politics, or in our households, or behaviourally, or what happens between people. So, you need communication to convey why an issue is important, what one can do about it, why it’s important to do it now versus another thing. It’s absolutely essential. And there are ways to do it better and worse. And we’ve done it worse for a long time. So, to me, you simply can’t get anywhere without communicating.
You might say communication, in the diversity of ways in which we humans have developed, is a uniquely human thing. Not that other species don’t communicate, in fact, we’re learning so many things about how trees communicate, so it’s not uniquely human. But we have developed an imaginal and abstract language that has enabled us to do what we do on the planet. We wouldn’t be here without it, in this particular role that we humans have.
Try making anything work without saying anything and you’ll know the answer to that question.
CCC: I wanted to get to the bottom of how the social change that communication can stimulate actually works. Is there a hard or fast rule for it? Bottom-up? Top-down? The power of the individual? Or perhaps mass media? What are the patterns that take place in this curious and complex process?
SM: One of the things that you might remember from the book is that we looked at social change at the individual level, the organizational level, local government levels, and then higher up: State, regional, federal, international, and cultural levels of change. To get even to change at the political or cultural level, you must think about who are the key people who can make the relevant changes.
Cultural change often sparks from an individual or a small group of people offering something new, an innovation, that begins to spread. Well, it doesn’t magically spread, it is actually individuals helping to make that spread happen. And that happens by me talking to my neighbor and illustrating more importantly than talking maybe, illustrating that I’m living a different way. And it becomes the social norm, and people look around and think, “Hmmm, I guess that’s how we’re supposed to behave now.”
Sooner or later we get a much larger effect. Sometimes technology does that, you know, it begins with a tiny little thing in your hand, and all of a sudden there are more iPhones than people in the world. So, sometimes the inspiration for a culture-wide effect comes from different places, whether it’s an individual, a political leader, a social movement leader, a technology, or a company, for that matter. But you need the fabric to spread.
And I’m not saying that we only need to do this from the bottom up. This is how you know, we got to wearing seatbelts. It wasn’t because there was this grand population-wide demand, “Please give me a seatbelt.” It was politicians, a very small handful of people saying, “Thou shalt wear a seatbelt.” And that’s how we changed eventually. Sometimes it’s mandated.
So, I guess what I’m trying to say is when it comes to behavior change, I still think the late Sharon Dunwoody, who unfortunately has now passed, was absolutely right - In behavior change, it’s far more important that you and I build a relationship and that you trust me. You think I’m doing the right thing and will think, “Oh, should I do that too?” That is still the gold standard. And in any other level of change, you need individuals to move it.
If you had a massive budget and could do mass media campaigns, great. But I will say the world of mass media is much changed from 15 years ago. We don’t have these sorts of big monoliths anymore, who all convey the same message to masses of people. It’s much more siloed into small media audiences and often very siloed from each other. So, I think it’s gotten harder to run mass media campaigns because of that change in technology and the necessity to reach people in these much more diverse channels that we have now.
CCC: You mention technologies and things like that so I’ll move on to the next question that deals with that. I want to dig deeper into what your thoughts are about the opportunities, as well as the risks, associated with this new communication landscape and all of these platforms and places people can go to get “news”.
SM: Well, I think one of the ways to think about it is that some media platforms are the preferred ones for certain audiences. So, one particular advantage and opportunity is to use certain channels like Instagram, or Facebook, or whatever it might be at any one time, as they have very varied audiences and you can use a platform almost as a shorthand for how to reach and tailor your communication accordingly. So, that’s one opportunity.
The ability to connect with each other - As we’ve seen in the youth climate movement, which is I think almost 100% reliant on social media channels - Those ways of being able to connect and do so very rapidly are super helpful for movement building and for engaging people staying up to date. The risk associated with that is the absolute overwhelm by all the different things that you could possibly constantly have scrolling over your screen. It becomes very difficult if you have 0.3 seconds to get someone’s attention. Like, what can you actually say? And how to say something when the attention span and the swipe syndrome make it nearly impossible to convey anything? So, it becomes very flashy and it becomes superficial in some ways, to be able to grab people.
I think we all tend to numb after a while. Imagine a ten-minute span that you might scroll through your own social media. By that time, you’re like what did I read 10 mins ago? You have no clue anymore. Memory is much shorter, you can’t go deep, and you go numb. All of these things make it much more difficult to stand out and have the in-depth conversations we need sometimes to address some of the deeper issues.
So, it’s very difficult, and of course, I already mentioned the siloing, our tendency to go with what in technical jargon we call homophilous groups - with people who are like us. That can be a real asset in communication, because you’re more trusted when you’re like the audience. But you only talk to yourself, you only talk to people who think like yourself, you don’t necessarily connect to people who have very different attitudes, opinions, concerns and I think we’re seeing the results of that which is we’re more divided in many ways. And much less able to come to some, not necessarily consensus, but agreement, on how to move forward on action. So it can slow us down.
In other words, we can go really fast and yet we can’t go anywhere. So, it’s a very difficult and hard-to-predict challenge that we now deal with with social media. It helps in many ways and it hinders in so many others.
CCC: Based on your wealth of knowledge on the subject, what’s the single most important aspect of communication that practitioners should pay attention to in their work?
SM: I think the first thing that I would say to people is relationships. Communication is ultimately about making something common to people. So, it is about the relationship as the very foundation of succeeding with communication. I often do that in my training, where I ask people to think about how they would connect with another person. I sometimes say, “Come as a friendly communicator,” or, “Come as a friend,” or, “How would you talk to someone if you were their friend?” Before you say anything about climate change, bring the bad news, or tell people what to do, you’d first connect.
“How are you doing?” or, “How are your kids?” Anything, whatever. Only then would you start to get into the topic. We often skip over that first part, that relationship-building part. You just don’t get anywhere. It’s much harder, once you have a relationship, to be nasty to each other. So, I wonder if the kind of contrarian exchanges with climate skeptics, deniers, whatever… If we ever sat down and connected on a human-to-human level, whether it would still be as hostile as the communication often is. So, that would be my first thing.
Beyond that, so much flows from having a human connection. These days, I think that connection will quickly lead to people telling you, almost behind their hands in a whispered tone, how afraid they are. Or how worried they are. Or how sad they are. So, if we’re in that emotional space around climate change, I think it’s essential to validate that and to normalize that that’s a healthy reaction to a really dysfunctional situation. We should help people understand that they aren’t alone in that. We’re so lonely in our climate change worries.
Then, we should help people translate their worry, their feelings, and their sadness, into action, as opposed to getting stuck and paralyzed in it. Really help them move. How do you translate that deep motivation from the heart into something you do out in the world?
I always teach people it’s probably at this point more important to teach social change than to teach climate change. How do we make change? Most people don’t know how policies get made. Most people don’t know how organizations or businesses or financial markets, or anything, work to affect our daily life. Where can they fit in? Where is their place of entry? And so, that’s where most of my focus is these days.
Tell me what you’re good at, what you love doing, what really sustains you, and I’ll tell you how that is helpful for climate change.
CCC: That was a wonderful answer. It reminded me of a study that Cialdini did, I think. He took young, competing football teams. They were warring tribes. It was like Lord of the Flies, and then they had a task that they had to complete together. Before long, they discovered they were very similar, had very similar interests, and they were friends by the end of it - and they’d also completed a common task.
SM: Absolutely. I think we’ll have to learn it. I am always skeptical of the name-calling and the blaming aspect of it. In particular in communication from the left, because in the end the floods are going to come to your town and you’re going to have to work with the person who was on the opposite end of the spectrum. Getting people to safety or sharing water when you don’t have much, or whatever the case may be, right?
How do you do that after you just completely trashed somebody? I think we ought to be very careful. A little more kindness doesn’t mean you can’t be fierce, but you don’t have to trash people. And of course, on the right, what we’ve seen are truly horrific attacks on climate scientists and climate activists, including hate mail and threats to life. That’s unacceptable. So, kindness from both sides would probably get us a lot further.
CCC: The kind of sister piece to the last question is, what’s the biggest mistake that scientists, communicators, policymakers, etc. make when attempting to engage the public on climate change issues?
SM: Well, there are a series of those mistakes. Some communicators still seem to be immune to what we’ve been saying for 20 years which is that the information deficit model isn’t working. In other words, just giving more information will not make a lot of people change what they do.
They ignore the emotional impact of what they’re saying. This means you’ve just shocked people out of their minds and they have gone numb and they cannot hear you anymore. They simply will not do anything because you’ve just scared them. So much. The sheer overwhelm of just keeping on going all the time with the worst news possible, we just can’t take it. We humans need to have a way of processing what’s happening and we don’t make space for that. So, sometimes a mistake in communication is to talk all the time and not listen. Not make space for silence. Not make space for taking in what was just said. It might be way more rhetorically impactful to let things sink in.
And then of course the perpetual problem is that people are still either not talking enough about the solutions very concretely, or they do it in such superficial and generic ways that people still don’t know what to do. Yes, I get that I’m supposed to have solar panels on my roof, but how do I deal with the money side of this? Where do I go? Who do I ask? What’s a good company to put them on my roof? Those are levels of effort that most people don’t have either the resources or the time for, and so we must unravel and unveil how to make those changes happen, whether it’s politically, or individually - “What exactly do you want me to do?”
“I get that climate change is bad, but I don’t want to get a PhD in climate science. So, what do I need to do? You just told me to get solar panels or drive less, well, how am I gonna get to work?” Those are just still the struggles, so unless we are much more specific and really address the barriers people face to enacting the changes we want them to make, at any of those levels we’ve been talking about, then all we did was scared them without really achieving much.
I continue to think that we have two reactions to scary news, or very impactful powerful news. If I’m scared to death by what you just said, I’m going to do something to reduce the risk of having to face it. Or I’m going to reduce the feeling about that. And that means numbing - I will just change the channel and shut down because I cannot hear anymore. So, which of those paths can you lead people down? If you want people to act on the risk information you just gave them, you gotta help them reduce the risk, not just overwhelm them and reduce the feeling about the risk. So, what specifically do you want people to do? Any communication in 2022 that doesn’t do that I think is a failed communication.
