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Climate change activism is certainly not new to the UK – NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have been campaigning since the 1980s.
But recent years have seen a rapid rise in new climate change protest groups: campaigns like Fridays For Future, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and Insulate Britain have risen to dominate the activism space.
In common with activists throughout history, climate protests face the question of what balance to strike between widespread attention, and widespread appeal. But whilst few members of the public tend to support the ‘means’ of radical, disruptive activism, their demands are often popular.
Can even unpopular protests have long term positive impacts? Whether raising awareness, increasing political ambition, shifting the “centre” or directly reducing emissions, activism has a range of aims and goals that impact on (and are shaped by) public and political opinion.
This thread curates opinion data around climate activism, as well as pointing to some significant campaign moments and actions to make sense of what is driving public and political opinion on climate activism.
What impact do visual representations of climate protesters in the media have on audiences? A new study has addressed this in light of the recent media trend towards depicting more young and female protesters in news stories.
By comparing audience responses to 10 different images (photo-edited to make comparisons in the study), the researchers found that images showing climate protestors and the police together, as well as images of younger protestors, tended to lead to more negative emotional responses amongst audiences. This included feelings of guilt and shame about climate impacts affecting future generations.
The content of the protest images did not deeply influence audiences’ broader climate attitudes and behaviours after viewing them. But the researchers did find that feelings towards protest images were influenced by a range of factors, such as the audiences’ gender, and suggest that the viewers’ worldview may play a role too.
What’s in a name? The question of what the best – most persuasive, or least polarising – term for climate change is, has a long history.
On the one hand, small tweaks to individual words or short phrases are unlikely to be driving big differences in perceptions one way or another. People’s values, worldviews, political ideology and increasingly the perceived fairness of different climate policies, are what drives public engagement.
But whether its the editorial choices made by leading international newspapers, to the framing of campaigns that drive media coverage of climate activism, linguistic choices do carry some weight. Previous research has argued that some terms (e.g. ‘global warming’) are more emotive; campaigners have criticised ‘climate change’ as a term for lacking urgency.
In a new open-access paper, researchers tested a wide range of different terms, including ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’, ‘climate crisis’, climate emergency’ and ‘climate justice’, in a survey of over 5000 US residents and concluded:
Overall, “climate change” and “global warming” were rated as most familiar and most concerning, and “climate justice” the least, with ratings for “climate crisis” and “climate emergency” falling in between.
Moreover, we find no evidence for “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” eliciting more perceived urgency than “climate change” or “global warming.”
We therefore recommend sticking with familiar terms, conclude that changing terminology is likely not the key solution for promoting climate action, and suggest alternative communication strategies.
The ‘alternative communication strategies’ might include identifying tangible ways in which audiences with different moral and political values could benefit from specific climate policies, or ensuring communities impacted by new energy infrastructure, or changes to urban travel systems, feel adequately consulted.
Confirming previous research around the general lack of familiarity with the term ‘climate justice’, the paper also noted that willingness to support climate-friendly policies and eat less red meat were lowest for ‘climate justice’ (which was the least familiar term tested).
This isn’t an argument for downplaying the importance of the issues the term refers to, which are central to both international climate governance and the implementation of specific in-country policies. But it does underscore the lack of recognition of the phrase among many public audiences, a finding which has also been observed in UK research.
In an open access paper published in the journal Nature Communications, a large sample of the German public (more than 24,000 people) was surveyed before and just after major climate protests/civil disobedience took place.
Following what the authors describe as ‘confrontational’ protest acts, levels of reported concern about climate change rose by just over 1% (not a huge number, but a meaningful uptick nonetheless with a sample of this size and given the high level of pre-existing concern in Germany).
Interestingly, there was no sign of political polarisation either. And although the political context in Germany differs in a range of ways to the UK, the study offers direct evidence that significant protests do ‘cut through’ in terms of national public opinion. This is not always easy to demonstrate without his form of ‘before and after’ study design.
In another new open access paper on a similar topic, researchers asked US participants in an online experiment to give their views on a range of civil disobedience tactics. They concluded:
Most Americans view climate-related NVCD as appropriate if it is non-violent and targeted towards those companies or entities which are responsible for taking actions to the detriment of the climate. This could be in the form of promoting fossil fuel use, or even accepting fossil fuel financing. Conversely, actions that are violent, or targeted at entities not seen as being responsible for exacerbating climate change are seen as inappropriate targets.
Gradually, the evidence base on how contemporary protest tactics are actually landing with members of the public is building. Studies like these are important for checking assumptions about the way in which people react to protests involving civil disobedience.
Concern levels are likely to temporarily tick upwards when protests capture the media spotlight, even if the elite commentary that gets the most bandwidth is high critical of demonstrations. But the more that protests can do to focus in on ‘valid’ or ‘legitimate’ targets, the higher the chance of bringing the wider public along.
In an analysis of the language used to describe climate activists on a range of social media platforms in 2022 and 2023, Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) identified a rise in labels such as “extremists”, “lunatics” or even “terrorists”. The analysis found that allusions to violence on social media appear to be increasing, particularly in comment sections. Key findings included:
This kind of online discourse is troubling. And on social media platforms with large numbers of users, shares can quickly add up, so the views of an angry minority can spread quickly.
Offline, although public attitudes towards disruptive protest groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are generally not positive, opinion data shows the UK public evenly split on whether campaigners are ‘out of touch’ with the rest of the country.
So although public opinion isn’t altogether favourable towards protesters, the violent language documented by CAAD is likely to be more ‘out of touch’ with mainstream popular opinion, than the actions of the protesters themselves.
The Social Change Lab investigated the so-called ‘radical flank’ effect: whether more radical/extreme protests can improve the perception or acceptability of more moderate campaigners.
Based on several waves of polling data conducted before and after the radical actions of Just Stop Oil in 2022 (blocking the M25 motorway), the authors found that increased awareness of Just Stop Oil after their motorway protest was linked with stronger identification with and support for Friends of the Earth (an increase from 50.3% to 52.9% of the population).
This is a potentially important finding, given that Just Stop Oil themselves are very unpopular among the public and the motorway protests were badly received/reported on very negatively by most media.
However, studies exploring similar questions around protests in other countries have not always always reached the same conclusions: there is not yet consistent evidence for a ‘positive’ radical flank effect from disruptive protest.
In May 2023, the government’s new Public Order Act came into force, significantly increasing the power of the police to respond to protests, and to introduce new criminal offences. The government made explicit reference to activist groups such as Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain as justifications for these measures.
The Act received widespread criticism from activist groups and other NGOs, as well as the UN Human Rights Chief. In particular, the Act introduced the following acts as criminal offences:
In addition, the Act has lowered the threshold to define “disruptive” protesting, and extended the use of stop and search powers for protests.
There is public support for punishing activists who cause disruption. For instance, 78% of Britons surveyed felt some form of punishment was appropriate for someone who has participated in a non-violent but disruptive protest, such as blocking a road (YouGov/Uni Bristol, July 2023). However, there was stronger support for fines as punishment (37%), rather than imprisonment (29%).
Formed by a group including some prominent previous Extinction Rebellion activists/spokespeople, the Climate Majority project responds to longstanding calls from public engagement strategists for campaigners to do more to explicitly get beyond the ‘bubble’ of supporters.
Emphasising the ‘hidden majority’ across society who care about climate change – a perspective backed up by a range of research in the past five years including Britain Talks Climate – the Climate Majority project represents a pivot from the strategy of Extinction Rebellion which argued that a critical mass of 3.5% of the population was required to rise up and create systemic change.
In a new paper (open-access link) published in the journal Language and Ecology, Clare Cunningham and her colleagues at York St John University analysed the prevalence and use of climate change words and phrases by politicians and activists.
The analysis revealed major differences. Activists use emotive language and talk about ecology, guilt, and morality. Politicians use much more technocratic language and focus on finance, trade-offs, technologies and the economy, reflecting a longstanding positioning of environmental issues among political elites as emerging from a cost-benefit analysis perspective.
Perhaps most strikingly, ‘people’ barely feature in politicians’ discourse on climate – showing up only as ‘bill payers’.
The analysis is important to help understand why campaigns aimed at political or other ‘elite’ groups can sometimes fail to land with public audiences, and vice-versa. In related research, IPPR tested a range of climate change narratives and found that (despite their common usage by climate campaigners) language around ‘green jobs’ was not as compelling for the public as language around protecting the environment for future generations, or the need to reduce the risks from climate impacts.
Climate Barometer tracker polling backs this up: the public is not very persuaded by arguments that climate policies will deliver lots of new jobs. But this is more likely to reflect a widespread lack of trust in the ability of government to deliver on its promises, than a distaste for green jobs.
In analysis by Kantar, coverage of protests at COP26 was found to have outstripped coverage of the conference itself (in traditional media).
On social media, Geta Thunberg was one of the biggest presences on Twitter, driving engagement with traditional coverage of COP26 protests.
What the public ‘sees’ at climate conferences can shape wider climate beliefs – and although there was small but significant increase in public optimism during the course of COP26, the dominance of protests in traditional and social media is likely to have conveyed an overall impression of the conference as a ‘problem’ (to be protested against) rather than part of the solution.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets on Friday 20th September 2019 in what was the biggest environmental protest in the UK to date. A rally in central London was attended by around 100,000 people.
From August 20th 2018 when Greta Thunberg first skipped school to protest for more action on climate change, to one of the largest movements of climate change activism across the world, the Fridays For Future movement resulted in 2019 being termed the “year of the climate strike“. Reuters present a timeline of the growth of Greta’s individual protest to global movement of activism.
Comment: How does the public perceive climate protesters?
Are climate protesters liked? Trusted? Seen as ‘out of touch’?