Our Researcher Luisa Melloh explores how our recent partnership with Flooded People UK supported community organisations in engaging people on climate, flooding, and impacts more broadly.
When everything about the climate crisis feels increasingly urgent, message testing and opinion insights work can sometimes feel far removed from the practical questions people working on the frontlines of climate change have.
At Climate Barometer, we’re always striving to make our work as applicable and relevant as possible to campaigners on the ground. That’s why earlier this year, we partnered with Flooded People UK on a joint research project looking at how insights can support community organisations in engaging the British public on climate, flooding and impacts more broadly in their work – and here’s what we learned:
What we did
We started by approaching Flooded People about a research collaboration, rather than coming in with preconceived ideas about what the research should or shouldn’t interrogate. Together, we designed a project that combined insights on public opinion on climate impacts and adaptation at the national level with the experiences and expertise of flooded people at the local level.
We first interviewed Flooded People’s community organisers, some with experience of flooding themselves, to better understand the nature of their work, what works and what’s challenging when it comes to how climate features in their work, and how climate does or does not show up in the conversations they have with people and communities impacted by flooding.
Through Flooded People’s moderators, we then asked an open question to the Flooded People UK support group to understand what affected people perceived as either help or hindrance in the reactions of others when they tell them about having been flooded, to surface both well-meaning misperceptions and gather local expertise on where flooded people themselves see the main issues with flood management.
Based on insights from the interviews and responses to the open question, we designed an online survey that we put to a nationally representative sample of approximately 1800 UK respondents, which included an experiment featuring videos of flooded people talking about their experience – using footage Flooded People had collected through their community work – to examine whether as trusted messengers, they can shape the general public’s views on climate and net zero, the ‘polluter pays’ principle and effective ways to tackle and adapt to worsening impacts.
We wrote up the insights generated from the interviews, support group responses and survey results and Flooded People UK tested their applicability in conversations and local flood group meetings with members about the nature of their problems, what kind of solutions they wanted and how they felt about the wider allocation of funding for flood defences.
What changed as a result
Confirming the effectiveness of flooded people as messengers and building climate messaging into Flooded People UK’s work: The research affirmed Flooded People’s approach in centring community voices and demonstrated that flooded people are highly effective and resonant messengers for communicating flooding and impacts more broadly with the UK public. It also influenced Flooded People UK’s communications and issue framing strategy and gave them the evidence to confidently talk about climate as part of their work in a way that brings people with them, rather than alienating them.
Strengthening community voices in the conversation with evidence to back up their argument: We had already conducted some research on the polluter pays principle in our Missing Links work and Flooded People were interested in how to communicate this on the ground in their specific climate impacts context. The findings gave them the evidence they needed and prompted members of the Flooded People network to use the data to create their own video content about making polluters pay for the cost of flooding. Social media engagement with the content showed that this kind of argument also resonated with people generally less receptive to climate change messaging in a flooding context.
What we learned
Building insights work from the ground up, not from the top down: Combining local and national level research strengthens campaign strategy for local organisers and can effectively make the link between locally experienced climate impacts on the one hand and calls for better nation-wide adaptation and mitigation efforts on the other, when it centres local experiences and clearly connects them to climate. Just as our polling insights on polluter pays arguments gave Flooded People the confidence to talk about this aspect in their work, so did their first-hand experience of affected communities’ frustrations with different flood risk management actors shape our way of asking questions to the wider public about how they perceive responsibility for flooding and impacts.
Ensuring the project is participatory and genuinely reflects locally affected people’s views and concerns: Many flooded people feel that climate change has in the past been used to justify inaction from the government (‘there’s only so much we can do’), making them wary of pre-determined climate asks or aims. As the engaged and thoughtful responses to our question in the Flooded People support group showed, people want to share their views, knowledge and expertise about flooding, but we have to let them have their say, not “train” them to deliver our message. Tokenistic inclusion of impacted people’s voices to prop up our own argument will almost always backfire, especially when climate change has been used to justify inaction from decision-makers. Trust and respecting one another’s expertise are key here.
Communications and engagement on climate and relational organising can inform and reinforce each other strategically: Community organising of flooded people can serve as a blueprint for organising people affected by climate impacts more broadly. This starts by validating experience and offering concrete support before bringing in campaign asks and tying individual agency and local expertise back to the structural picture, by emphasising how all relevant actors need to play their part on climate.
In conclusion, it’s clear to see that local lived experience and national opinion insights can enrich advocacy work around climate impacts. But for this to succeed, it has to be matched by funding that is flexible enough to be led by needs on the ground, just like organisations working on the frontlines of climate change are led by the needs of the people impacted.
We are grateful to Flooded People UK for this opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other.
You can read more about some of the flooding and wider climate impacts insights generated from this project here. We will also launch the full results and project report over the next couple of months, so watch this space.
Keir Starmer made a fleeting visit to Brazil, ahead of the opening of COP30. But is the British public paying attention?
Recent More in Common data shows COP isn’t top-of-mind for most people (only 8% say they are ‘very aware’ of the conference), and there is a sense of ‘summit fatigue’. But despite growing weariness with the glacial pace of change, Britons still see the UN as the best-placed body to lead action on global issues like climate change.
People all over the world want climate action that is genuinely inclusive, as evidenced by the level of engagement with the People’s Summit in the run up to COP30. This year there is a push to create a ‘Citizens Track’ to more formally build in public opinion to the COP process. Combatting misinformation and shoring up ‘information integrity’ in climate communication is high on the agenda for the first time.
And there are some remarkable similarities in the core concerns of people around the world.
Consider Earth4All’s latest report on Brazil: the country has a pathway to eliminate poverty by 2040 while building a renewable energy powerhouse, and there is a strong mandate for action: 81% of Brazilians say major action is needed this decade to protect the climate and nature.
Yet only 35% believe their government is doing enough, and still need to be convinced policies are affordable and fair – a story familiar from patterns in British public opinion.
Zack Polanski has won the Green Party’s leadership race, ushering in a new era for the party. Polanski won the leadership race by an emphatic margin – but will his unique brand of ‘eco populism’ cut through with voters?
Climate Barometer data shows reasonable agreement with the idea that the super rich are the most responsible for climate change. In April this year, we asked the public for views on the following statement: “Together, the richest 1% of people in the world emit twice as much carbon as the poorest 50% combined”. While over a third of Britons said they had not heard this narrative at all (36%) – interestingly, many had heard and agreed with it (39%) and very few disagreed with it overall (4%).
Across political divides, Green backers were the most likely to have heard and agree with the idea that the super rich are to blame (66%), and the narrative resonates with a majority of the Labour base too (56%).
There was even reasonable agreement amongst Reform backers, with a third of this group (30%) saying they had both heard and agree with it – while just a minority had heard and disagree with it (8%). It’s Conservative backers who appear to be more on the margins here, being the least likely to have heard and agree with the statement (28%).
Together this suggests that narratives which pin the blame on the super rich still have more traction to gain – but when the message does get picked up, it tends to land well across a wide political spectrum, perhaps only failing to resonate with Tory backers.