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Grounded in an analysis of the online discourse around the sweltering summer of 2022 in the UK, ACT Climate Labs issued guidance for anticipating and responding to misinformation around extreme weather, as well as engaging the ‘Persuadable’ 60% of the population who are neither highly engaged nor antagonistic towards climate action.
Echoing earlier work by Climate Outreach around flood risks and communication, ACT Climate Labs recommend not focusing too much on climate during a heatwave (this can be off-putting or appear judgmental/spoiling people’s positive experiences of warmer weather) but using the period of increased climate salience that follows extreme weather to engage audiences then.
In the face of rising climate impacts, UK-based researchers are calling for more measures that simultaneously tackle the root causes of climate change, while enabling society to adapt.
Efforts to tackle climate change have tended to prioritise mitigation (reducing emissions) over adaptation efforts (reducing vulnerabilities), and these two broad types of measures are often split across government departments, such as Defra and DESNZ in the UK.
But new research, using the UK’s record-breaking 40C heatwave in 2022 as a case study, has found clear demands for national and local governments to roll out measures that combine mitigation and adaptation.
Policy-makers, climate organisations, and those working in emergency response felt that approaches – such as creating climate-resilient neighbourhoods, tree-planting and other nature-based solutions – should be a priority, given their dual benefits. They felt efforts to combine emissions reductions and adaptation have challenges, but were feasible, with better coordination.
The new analysis also suggests that framing these efforts as part of working towards a ‘climate resilient net zero’ can be a useful way of engaging a range of relevant audiences and decision-makers – building on existing support for net zero.
The study findings are supported by Climate Barometer tracker insights, which shows that both the public and MPs feel mitigation and adaptation are equally important. It also echoes previous work which found that the public view mitigation and adaptation as “two sides of the same coin”.