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#FramingClimateJustice

Welcome!

Thank you for joining us for this open webinar that we’ve put together to share the findings of our Framing Climate Justice project.

It’s amazing and humbling to be joined by so many folks from across the UK, and those of you who are joining us from around the world.

We’ve put this session together to share our work on the Framing Climate Justice project, a UK-based project working to build a stronger community of practice, coming up with ways to improve how we communicate about climate justice to the UK public.

Whilst we wrapped up the initial phase of the project earlier this year, the world has since experienced a pandemic and uprisings for Black lives!

And so, we’ll be sharing the learnings from of the project with you today, and offering some reflections and questions on what the experiences of 2020 might mean for this work, which we feel is as important now as ever it was.

We’d also like to be very clear that this project, and the research that we carried out as part of it, is very much focussed on the UK context. However, we hope that some of the work that we’ve done—the process that we undertook, and the things that we’ve learnt here—may relevant to those of you joining us from other parts of the world. ��

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OVERVIEW

Who, what, where, when...

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PROJECT

26 participants

12 months

07 staff

05 sessions

03 research phases

01 community

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Hosted by...

Future Conversations

Project

Here we all are, and the organisations that we’re connected to! This is a photo taken at one of our residential sessions in April last year - in Stafford, UK.

The project has been hosted PIRC, 350 and NEON.

Project Participants:

Mila Aliana, Wisdom Weavers of the World

Sarah Barfield Marks, Possible

Matt Bonner, Possible

Sheri Carr, London Leap

Zahra Dalilah, independent

Gabriel Davalos, Purpose Climate Lab

Shaun Dey, Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group & Reel News

Clare Hymer, Labour for a Green New Deal & Novara

Harpreet Kaur Paul, Academic

Fausto Llopis, Future Conversations Project & 7 generations indigenous tribe project.

Hannah Martin, Green New Deal UK

Lise Masson, Reclaim the Power

Rowan Mataram, Platform

Nonhlanhla Makuyana, Positive Money

Rob Noyes, Platform & Fuel Poverty Action

Melz Owusu, Academic & Free Black University

Fliss Premru, Campaign Against Climate Change Trade Union Group & Reel News

Lesley Rankin, IPPR

Georgia Rigg, Amnesty International

Chris Saltmarsh, Labour for a Green New Deal

Emma Simpson, independent

Danmore Sithole, African Health Policy Network

Florence Stuart-Leach, Greenpeace

Nathan Thanki, Demand Climate Justice

Morten Thaysen, Greenpeace

Chris Venables, Green Alliance

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Kennedy Walker

Guppi Bola

Chris Shaw

Asad Rehman

Majandra Rodriguez Acha

Daniel Voskoboynik

Meera Ghani

Our thanks also to the �project’s funders:��KR Foundation, Polden-Puckham Charitable Foundation, Friends Provident Foundation. �And core funders including JRCT, 1970 Trust, Jam Today, Marmot Charitable Trust, Network for Social Change and the Open Society Initiative for Europe.

Project friends & advisors:

Dalia Gebrial

Yosola Olajoye

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Now, before we dive further into the details, here’s a brief introduction to the term framing, for those on this call who are newer to this work:

Framing is the choices we make in what we say and how we say it:

What we emphasise
How and what we explain
What we leave unsaid

These choices matter. They affect how people hear us, what they understand, and how they act.

Framing helps us to be heard and understood. When we change the story and how we tell it, we can make change happen!

We find this fab visual a helpful way of understanding the difference between Story, Narrative and Framing—by illustrator Zsofi Lang, based on the work of one of PIRC’s Associates—James Robertson.

[pause, to allow people to process the visual for a few seconds]

So, framing is powerful! Narrative is powerful! Stories are powerful! But we should caution that there are limits, and no story is a sure-fire shortcut to building social, political, or economic power. We are not trying to claim that if you use such and such a frame you will tip the balance of power decisively in the favour of climate justice! We think the findings from our project are important - obviously - but we want to remain realistic in how we present them.

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Climate

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Climate

For a long time, communications from the mainstream of the climate & environmental movement have focussed on emissions targets, individual behaviour change, harm to non-human victims like polar bears, biodiversity loss and techno fixes.

There has been a lot of effort on communicating that climate change is real, and bad, with appeals to the science. There has not been a lot of effort to communicate the role of exploitative systems, the historic responsibility for this, or the unequal impacts on different groups of people around the world.

So, in the Autumn of 2018, following a summer of dangerous heatwaves in Northern Europe and increasing destabilisation around the world—accompanied by media outlets celebrating ‘staycation’ weather—we set about this work of putting global justice into the centre of climate framing, and amplifying the work of those who are already doing just that!

Talking about climate justice can be challenging because it brings together concepts that are not commonly linked in people’s minds - climate change and colonialism, climate change and capitalism; Because it can be uncomfortable to raise the spectre of historic responsibility; And because it can be jarring to hear about impacts in faraway places when we have climate impacts happening right here, right now.

But in our communications we need to move on. We need to move on from simply convincing everyone that ‘humans cause climate change’ — to an understanding of ‘which humans, and which systems’. We need to shift gears from persuading people that ‘humans need to act’ — to ‘who needs to do what, and why.’

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AIMS

Strengthen the climate justice movement

Understand how the UK public thinks

Improve climate justice comms

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ARC

Community building

Audience research

Frame Design

Frame testing

Comms outputs

The process the project followed...

Here are the different stages of the project arc, which we worked through emergently, hoping to meet our aims:

Community building - bringing together people from a variety of organisations, to work together through an intensive process of residential sessions, with action learning and discussions in between.
Audience research - carrying out a literature review and running original focus groups, to understand the existing beliefs of people in the UK.
Frame Design - building clarity on what we wanted our frames to do, based on our shared vision and the results of the audience research; and then designing a set of climate justice frames to go out and test.
Frame testing - using three methodologies to test our frame ideas.
Comms outputs - finally, the stage that we are now in: creating a series of tools and resources, building on the work we’ve undertaken together, to share the learnings from the project with the wider movement - with you folks!

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ARC

Community building

Audience research

Frame Design

Frame testing

Comms outputs

We’ll focus on...

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Climate Justice:�Our Story

Climate change is real and it’s happening here and now.

Exploitative systems drove and continue to exacerbate the problem (colonialism, capitalism).

Climate change multiplies existing injustices. Those who have done least to cause it are suffering the worst.

Our sphere of concern is global.

Responsibility lies with elites and systems, not individuals.

We need solutions at every level.

We need to take more direction from the most impacted communities (particularly in the Global South).

We need to redistribute resources, decentralise power and reparate exploited communities.

Our vision is one of abundance, where there is more than enough to go around, and both people & planet can thrive.

Change is possible.

Before we go into the detail of the audience research, we thought we’d share some key ingredients of our own understanding of climate justice: What Our Climate Justice Story looks like, without any careful comms packaging, from our project community.

We believe that...

… Climate change is real and it’s happening here and now.

Exploitative systems drove and continue to exacerbate the problem (colonialism, capitalism).

Climate change multiplies existing injustices. Those who have done least to cause it are suffering the worst.

Our sphere of concern is global.

Responsibility lies with elites and systems, not individuals.

We need solutions at every level.

We need to take more direction from the most impacted communities (particularly in the Global South).

We need to redistribute resources, decentralise power and reparate exploited communities.

Change is possible.

Our vision is one of abundance, where there is more than enough to go around, and both people & planet can thrive.

What does your vision of climate justice look like? We’re going to pause for a moment here, and invite you to sketch or note down some key components for yourself.

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OPINION

How do people in the UK think?

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ARC

Community building

Audience research

Comms objective

Frame testing

Comms outputs

Where we are...

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We searched for research about public thinking on climate justice, and we found...

We searched for research about public thinking on climate justice, in a literature review (of 41 sources)… but we found very little.

There is a lot of research on whether people think climate change is happening, whether humans are responsible, how bad it is, what we can do etc.

This is well trod territory and we can answer these briefly as follows …

Yes, people think it’s happening, here and now. Scepticism about climate change is very rare. (BSA, 2018).
Yes, people think humans are (at least partially) responsible. Most people (88%) think this, and that is changing over time. More people think it now than they did even in 2018.
Yes, people think it is bad. A majority agree we are in a climate emergency. (Opinium, 2019). And a majority (in 28 different countries) think the following scenarios are likely: serious damage to the global economy; cities lost to rising seas; mass displacement of people, and small wars. (YouGov, 2019).
Yes, people think that we could still address climate change, with widespread and drastic measures, but aren’t confident that we will do what is needed. (YouGov, 2019; BSA, 2018).

In sum, awareness and concern about climate change is high in the UK, and at the time we did the project was reaching record highs.

This seems to hold true today, even during the pandemic. A report last month from The Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations shows that concern about climate change has increased since August last year, and there is greater support for climate change mitigation policies including measures to decrease meat consumption and flying.

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So we did our own...

But when it comes to questions about climate justice, we couldn’t find research on where people stood on the pillars of Our Story, such as: ‘Colonialism and capitalism drove the climate crisis’; ‘the most affected are also the least responsible’; ‘climate change multiples existing oppressions’.

We also realised that, without insight, climate justice campaigners tend to assume the worst: That people don’t have any understanding or sympathy for these ideas.

So, we carried out some of our own research,

We ran three focus groups in London, Aberystwyth and Aberdeen in June 2019.
We ran a large representative survey with YouGov, using a sample of 1589 people, in December 2019.

We sought to understand the British ‘common sense’ on climate justice: the kinds of beliefs and opinions people across social groups in Britain are likely to readily reach for to understand climate change as a justice issue. During the survey we also collected a range of demographic information about people and also found some key differences in thinking, for instance by political affiliation, Brexit vote and age.

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COMMON GROUND

People know that climate change is happening, here & now, and it’s quite bad.
People point the finger at government & corporates, not individuals. This is partly because responsibility is linked to culpability and power to change things.
People think the status quo isn’t working, and that some industries are damaging.
People think big changes are needed, and everyone should have a bigger role in developing solutions, including frontline and indigenous communities, but mostly scientists and experts.
Important new insights: People tend to agree that the least responsible suffer most. Young people tend to agree that climate change multiplies existing injustices,�but older people don’t!

Useful for establishing trust �and saving time in comms.

These are the areas where there is common ground between what we want to say about Climate Justice and where the public are at.

Responsibility - People don’t really buy the idea that individuals are responsible - yes we can all play our part, but that part is very limited. Instead, people locate responsibility upwards, in government and business. There is a catch here, however, because although people have a strong belief in government responsibility it’s also the case that a majority of people (58%) don’t trust the government to act on climate change.
Status quo - Across the focus groups there was consensus that the system isn’t working. The damaging areas of the economy that people talked about most were energy, food & agriculture, textiles and transport. So people wouldn’t necessarily name systems like capitalism, and much less colonialism, but they could talk very fluently about the damaging global impacts of consumerism and e.g. cheap t shirts on our high street coming from Bangladesh. We know that they have social and environmental cost. Which we can see as a way in to talking about systems.
Bigger role - When we gave people a range of actor and asked who needs a bigger role in developing solutions, people say everyone, including frontline and indigenous communities. But people want scientists and experts to have a much bigger role. So there is a sense that we can all step up, but that it should really be expert led, rather than experience led.
Important new insights: We explored where people stood on some key climate justice areas.

First - When reacting to the statement ‘most affected are the least responsible’, about half of our survey respondents agreed but not strongly. And it cut by political affiliation - Labour voters are much more likely to agree with this more, Conservatives significantly less.

Second - On whether CC increases existing oppressions, the most common response was that it has no impact - climate change does not discriminate where or who it impacts so will not impact on injustice and inequality. So that’s not really an area of common ground! But it’s in here because the age reversal here is very interesting. Young people are most likely to think that marginalised groups are most impacted by climate change, and chose this over the other interpretations of who it affects.

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FAULT LINES

How did we get here?

Who’s responsible for the problem?

Does climate relate to oppression?

What’s human nature like?

What’s our focus?

Whose leadership do we need?

What solutions do we propose?

What’s our vision?

How do we feel about future?

MOVEMENT BELIEFS

Colonialism, capitalism, design

Profiteers, elites

Multiplies it

Changeable, capable

Global

Frontline communities

New world: system change

Abundance

Optimistic, hope

PUBLIC BELIEFS

Accident, industrialisation

China, India, humans

No impact, don’t know

Fixed, greedy

Local

Global North, e.g. America

New technology, new laws

Scarcity

Fatalism, distrust (some hope)

Need to pick the most strategic to try and bridge in communications, testing can help.

So on this slide there is a summary of some of the key areas of difference we found between our own thinking on climate justice, and what the public thinks. For anyone on the call who is visually impaired this is all contained in prose in our longer research briefing. For now I’m just going to pause for half a minute to let people take it in and then highlight a few of the interesting findings we had.

We’re just going to highlight three areas we found particularly interesting.

First off, we found a big difference on whether we got to here by accident or design. People do not really have a strong sense of historical responsibility for the climate crisis, because there’s this belief that the causes of climate change were unintentional - that emitting Co2 was an unfortunate side effect of industrialisation. This idea of ‘Innocent industrialisation’ takes us off the hook, historically, because ‘we didn’t know the impact of what we were doing back then’.

Linked to that: colonialism and capitalism are just not in the picture. People really struggle to make this connection even when it’s introduced. One of the reasons is that people see the climate crisis quite narrowly as a problem of carbon emissions with impacts like sea level rise and warming. They also see this as a problem that affects everyone. People don’t tend to think about the climate crisis as being linked to systems that exploit particular groups of people and resources around the world. We have our work cut out to make these links between exploitative systems, historical responsibility and climate change. It will take more than a good frame to get there!

Doing this work in Britain, it felt like the Britain was largely absent from both the problem and the solution. In terms of the problem, people tended to point to the emerging economies (China and India) as being most culpable right now, rather than wealthy economies. And in terms of the solutions, it seemed that people were looking outside the UK for leadership, largely to the US, as a country with more power to make change.

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RECOMMENDATIONS

Explain how climate change multiples oppression, rather than simply state that it does.
Address people’s distrust of government when appealing to government responsibility.
Introduce economic design into the frame, using relatable examples (like textiles)
Connect the dots between colonialism and capitalism using economic design
Name the countries and communities, rather than using ‘Global South’
Acknowledge the problems we have in the UK, when advocating global solidarity
Leverage the hope people do have!

From the audience research we did.

So although we’ve only skimmed through some of our findings for now, these are the key recommendations we came out with from the audience research.

People do need help to make the connections between climate change and social injustices - in some ways it might be easier to talk about this now that covid and the movement for black lives has exposed how crises hit discriminated groups harder ‘we’re all in the same storm, but we’re not in the same boat’
If we want to appeal to government responses we have to address distrust, for example talking about what will ensure resources go where they are supposed to.
We can talk about how the economic system runs along faulty but intentional design principles, with examples like the textile industry
We can talk about how these design problems go back hundreds of years
We should be specific about countries and communities we’re talking about, people don’t use terms like ‘Global South’ or ‘developing countries’ consistently at all
We have to reassure people in the UK that it is not a zero sum game: resources can and should go to the solutions needed here AND to solutions globally. (‘Start with Yorkshire, end with Bangladesh’)
People do have some hope that we’ll find solutions to climate change, even if it’s not in the immediate future. We should appeal to this rather than stoking fatalism.

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FRAMING

What & how should we communicate?

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ARC

Community building

Audience research

Comms objective

Frame testing

Comms outputs

Where we are...

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We want our communications to help people understand that:

colonialism & capitalism created & continue to drive the climate crisis,
climate change is increasing oppression and injustice,
we can solve the problem and lead better lives by redistributing power...
and centring impacted communities (especially in the Global South)

OBJECTIVES

�

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FRAMES

NARRATIVES

Emergency, Solidarity, Responsibility, Hope
How do these shift people across our whole set of objectives?

VALUES

Universal collective, Self-direction, National Security
How do these build understanding that climate change increases oppression?

METAPHORS

Economy is like a … Rigged game, Blueprint, Shared Meal
How do these help us connect climate to colonialism and capitalism?

Through a series of creative sessions, we put together a set of frame ideas, made up of narratives, values-based frames, metaphors and examples, which we would take into our testing phase of the project.

Most of these were designed with the intention to move people towards our understanding of climate justice, our comms objective. And we also included a couple of existing frames that we wanted to test out too (emergency, national security).

For example, our four narrative ideas were made up of:

Emergency Narrative - emphasising crisis and doom
Solidarity Narrative - emphasising solidarity/connecting struggles between UK and global south
Responsibility Narrative - emphasising UK’s historical responsibility for climate change - ‘least responsible most impacted’
Hope Narrative - emphasising collective action and people power achieving our vision

Values:

Universal collective - Connecting local and global community, widening our sphere of concern, ‘what affects one affects us all’.
Freedom and self-direction values - Emphasising the agency and voice of people affected. ‘Nothing about us without us’.
Security values [oppositional frame] - Emphasising the need for stability and security (including national security), in the UK.

Metaphors:

Focusing on role of economy in particular to bring capitalism into the frame, challenging the widely held belief that the economy is a fixed thing that we can’t change:

Rigged Game - Talking about colonialism and capitalism as rigged games that benefit some at the expense of others, and lead to climate change. We need to rewrite the rules.
Blueprint - Talking about colonialism as being a historical blueprint, in terms of exploitation and environmental damage, that is continuing now through capitalism and climate change. We need a new blueprint for a better, less damaging system.
Shared meal - Talking about colonialism and capitalism as being like ordering different meals, where some people have eaten very well, and others haven’t. Those responsible need to pay for what they have eaten.

Don’t worry too much about the specifics of these individual frame ideas, we will share the nuances and results from how people responded to all of these—and more—in our accompanying resources, which you’ll hear more about later.

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Street interviews
Asking family and friends
YouGov survey experiment

Community building

Audience research

Comms objective

Frame testing

Comms outputs

TESTING

So, we went out and tested our frame ideas, using three different methodologies:

participant-led street Interviews with 22 people
In-depth informal testing conversations with 10 people
And a professional-led survey experiment with YouGov and 4000 respondents;

We tested out our different frame ideas by giving people a sample text on climate change, framed with different values, metaphors, or historical examples, and comparing the results to those who had not been given any text to read - a baseline group.

NOTE: any testing is better than no testing!

This is important!

If you’re coming up with an idea of how to communicate something, try asking even one other person if it helps them understand, and see whether they see things the same way as you? Try and reach outside your social circle if you can, why not chat to your nan, or a neighbour you don’t know yet.

This is something anyone can do in your work. We ran an expensive poll with YouGov, but the street interviews and asking family and friends was totally free.

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Emphasise solidarity with those most affected.
Be careful not to rely too much on emergency framing (crisis, doom).
Appeal to self-direction when talking about affected groups’ involvement in decisions.
Introduce economic design into the frame, using metaphors �(like ‘blueprint’ or ‘rigged game’).

RECOMMENDATIONS

From the frame testing.

And these are the headline framing recommendations that we found out through the testing phase and we’re going to unpack these in the following slides….

Emphasise Solidarity with those most affected, in the UK and around the world.�We have to reassure people in the UK that it is not a zero sum game: resources can and should go to the solutions needed here AND to solutions globally. �
Be careful not to rely too much on emergency framing.�This means dialling down on crisis and doom, to avoid people thinking that climate change has no impact on existing injustices. And we know from this research that most people already think that climate change is an emergency.�
Appeal to values of self-direction when talking about the need for affected communities to be involved in decision-making.�This means naming that it is intrinsically important that affected groups have voice, appealing to ‘self-determination’, ‘freedom’, ‘having a say’.�
Use metaphors to help introduce economic design into the analysis Introduce economic design into the frame, using relatable examples and metaphors (like rigged game etc). We can talk about how the economic system runs along faulty but intentional design principles, with examples like the textile industry.

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FRAMING RESULTS 1

Emphasise solidarity with �those most affected

Top result for agreeing least responsible are the most affected
Top result for agreeing those affected should play a bigger role in developing solutions
Top result for having hope for solutions in the next 20 years

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FRAMING RESULTS 2

Be careful with emergency frames

Made people point the finger at the big global actors (governments & corporations)
Top result for calling for indigenous communities to have bigger role in developing solutions
… but also top result for a more top-down approach from scientists and experts�
Made people more likely to say climate change has no impact on existing injustices

FRAMING RESULTS 2:

Be careful with emergency frames

Made people point the finger at the big global actors (governments & corporations)
Top result for calling for indigenous communities to have bigger role in developing solutions

… but also top result for prompting a more top-down approach, calling for scientists and experts to have a bigger role
Made people more likely to say climate change has no impact on existing injustices

Mostly it made people want a more top down approach, so it’s interesting it was also the top result for indigenous communities (we can’t fully understand that from this initial round of testing!)

Emergency frame - v important to note that it performed worse than nothing, it wasn’t just worst of the frames we tested, it was worse than baseline on oppression.

Another way to talk about findings like that is a 'backfire effect' - e.g. actually worse than saying nothing at all, moving people in the wrong direction

There are examples of emergency framing from Extinction Rebellion.

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FRAMING RESULTS 3

Appeal to self-direction when �talking about affected groups

More likely to say climate change impacts the most marginalised
More likely to blame wealthy governments
More support for a bigger role of governments of poorer countries in solutions

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FRAMING RESULTS 4

Introduce economic design �with metaphors

Helps prompt people on human causes and impacts of climate change
Makes it easier to talk about roles of wealthy elites and economic justice (e.g. disproportionate impacts on poor)
Might help introduce colonialism and capitalism, but...
Some people didn’t like references to elites & bristled at ‘blame game’

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Opinion Research�+�Frame Testing�=

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Explain how climate change multiplies oppression, rather than simply state that it does.
Introduce economic design into the frame, using relatable examples and metaphors.
Connect the dots between colonialism and capitalism using economic design.
Name the countries and communities, rather than using ‘Global South’.
Emphasise solidarity with those most affected.

Appeal to self-direction when talking about affected groups’ involvement in decisions.
Acknowledge the problems we have in the UK, when advocating global solidarity.
Address people’s distrust of government when appealing to government responsibility.
Be careful not to rely too much on emergency framing (crisis, doom).
Leverage the hope people do have!

SUMMARY

Explain how climate change multiplies oppression, rather than simply state that it does.�People do need help to make the connections between climate change and social injustices - in some ways it might be easier to talk about this now that covid has exposed how crises hit discriminated groups harder ‘we’re all in the same storm, but we’re not in the same boat’
Introduce economic design into the frame, using relatable examples and metaphors.�We can use these, and other relatable examples, to talk about how the economic system runs along faulty but intentional design principles, which can be redesigned.
Connect the dots between colonialism and capitalism using economic design.�We can talk about how these design problems go back hundreds of years.
Name the countries and communities, rather than using the term ‘Global South’.�We should be specific about countries and communities we’re talking about, people don’t use terms like ‘Global South’ or ‘developing countries’ consistently at all.
Emphasise solidarity with those most affected.�resources can and should go to the solutions needed here AND to solutions globally.
Appeal to self-direction when talking about affected groups’ involvement in decisions.�This means naming that it is intrinsically important that affected groups have voice, appealing to ‘self-determination’, ‘freedom’, ‘having a say’.
Acknowledge the problems we have in the UK, when advocating global solidarity.�This means, for instance, starting with Yorkshire, ending with Bangladesh, emphasising where the problems and solutions are the same. We can draw on the pandemic as an example of how crisis anywhere affects us everywhere.
Address people’s distrust of government when appealing to government responsibility.�If we want to appeal to government responses we have to address distrust, for example talking about what will ensure resources go where they are supposed to.
Be careful not to rely too much on emergency framing (crisis, doom).�This means dialling down on crisis and doom, to avoid people thinking that climate change has no impact on existing injustices. And we know from this research that most people already think that climate change is an emergency.
Leverage the hope people do have!�People do have some hope that we’ll find solutions to climate change, even if it’s not in the immediate future. We should appeal to this rather than stoking fatalism.

With all this, we see much to be hopeful about in how the UK public think about climate change. We are not yet at the point where Our Story about climate justice is common sense, but people are receptive to some key moral principles, and there is potential for shifts in thinking (for instance, on colonialism) that until now would have seemed impossible.

Limitations - there has been very little research of climate justice framing, and although this research is a start, there is so much more work to be done! which we’ll hear some suggestions from Hannah on this, in the final part of the presentaiton shortly.

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NEXT STEPS

TAKING STOCK & SHARING TOOLS

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WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Where might space have opened or closed with our common ground?

�Have any new fault lines emerged, or been exacerbated?

What do Covid-19 and BLM mean for this work?

Just as we were closing the research work for this project early this year, the COVID-19 pandemic hit Europe. Since then, we’ve experienced a series of huge movement moments in the fight for Racial Justice, as Black Lives Matter uprisings took route around the world, led by Black communities on the frontlines. It’s too soon to know how these experiences will impact public understanding and thinking about climate justice, at depth. But we have some suggestions to offer you, at this stage, based on some initial conversations we’ve had as a community. �

Importantly, although the research we’ve explored in this presentation was gathered before the pandemic, we think many of the key findings are of long term relevance because we probed the deeper understandings and belief systems that people draw upon to make sense of social and environmental issues—and this is not the kind of thing that can change overnight.

So, where are we now? Where might space have opened or closed with our common ground?

Our experiences of both the Coronavirus Pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprisings have created long-overdue space to make the link between historic colonialism and the neo-colonialism of today, and to talk about how climate change multiplies historic oppressions. Covid-19 has thrown existing inequalities into relief, most sharply with the disproportionate impact of the virus on Black and Brown lives, which may be shifting public understanding that large-scale global crises such as climate change, coronavirus and white supremacy affect us all, but not in the same way. It gives weight to our recommendation to universalise but not obscure inequality when it comes to climate framing. And where there was previously little public understanding of reparations as core to a just response to the climate crisis, space may now be opening to join these dots and build much-needed support.
The times we live in are also showing us that big dramatic change is possible, and quickly. The pandemic has seen dramatic action taken at every level, from the global search for a vaccine to local community mutual aid efforts. The world has mobilised at a pace and scale that we’ve long been calling for when it comes to tackling the climate crisis. How we think about human nature really matters right now, and we’ve seen more public celebration of our adaptability, our capacity for compassion and kindness, and demonstrations of solidarity both within communities and across borders. And at the same time, the Movement for Black Lives has created a monumental narrative shift towards facing history, valuing Black lives, and defunding the police—narrative changes that are leading to concrete action, seeing resources diverted away from racist institutions that, up until just a few short weeks ago, appeared untouchable in mainstream narratives.
With these huge shifts taking place, we’ve got an opportunity now to counter the creeping fatalism of late-stage capitalism that’s had its claws dug so deeply into our public mindsets. We can do this by lifting up examples of powerful collective action for Black Lives, by celebrating community mutual aid efforts, and emphasising solidarity with those most affected by the converging crises of white supremacy, coronavirus, and climate change.

Is anything harder now, in framing climate justice? Have any new fault lines emerged, or been exacerbated?

Following the increasing momentum that action on climate change was garnering in public attitudes over the past 2 years, recent polling shows climate change has fallen down the priority list for people in the UK, following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. People in the UK feel that climate change is not a priority now, it’s a priority in the future: It’s still important, but we’ve got to deal with immediate covid impacts, then come back to it.
This presents us with significant framing challenges. It may be tempting to cite Covid-19 as an example of future disasters we’ll see as a result of climate change. But from our research on the FCJ project, we know that the answer to this is not to go in heavy on climate urgency/emergency framing, this having come at the cost of socially-just approaches to cc in the past. It may be useful to emphasize that, like with Covid-19, action now prevents further escalation of death later and opens up space for our vision, but proceed with caution. It may be more helpful to focus on the kind of society we need to respond to both crises: Internationalism and communities being pillars of both.
Whilst space may have opened up for the role of government action in addressing large-scale crises, the shadow to this is that support for government-imposed lockdowns and encroachment on civil liberties may give social license for more authoritarian anti-democratic responses to climate change. Governments have closed borders, stoked global division (e.g. pointing the finger at China for causing the Pandemic, which exacerbates pre-existing public blaming of emerging economies China and India for the climate crisis), encouraged social policing by scapegoating vulnerable and marginalised populations, and are now deprioritising our collective health, relationships and futures, in favour of ‘rescuing’ the economy. As a result, we are seeing public narratives centre on nationalistic responses to the pandemic, and activating individual responsibility frames.
We know that solutions to the biggest issues we face today need to be rooted in internationalism, global justice and the decentralisation of power to local communities: To steer away from these growing trends, we’ll need to work hard to promote an expansive and diverse understanding of us, and emphasize community action and decentralised solutions, directed by those most impacted.

For Q&A: Current and future framing strategies of those in power

As we move into the next phase of the global Covid-19 pandemic, these are some possible framing strategies to watch out for:

Recovery / return to normal vs. building for the just transition. Lots of thinking is happening on ways of countering ‘return to business-as-usual’ framing with calls for a just recovery and visions of building back better with a Green New Deal. Challenges for us in avoiding jargon (e.g. resilience) and in centring a vision of abundance, which will feel very far away to many who have been hardest hit by the intersecting crises.
The battle for rhetoric: The terms we’re will be really similar across the political spectrum—the devil is in the detail. We’ve already the co-option of ‘Build Back Better’ from both the Government and other actors. We’ve got an opportunity here to ‘go big’ in challenging people to go deeper, by showing impact, causes, how things are linked, and naming where fault lines exist.
The economy and health are in opposition, according to the gov’t. Doesn’t feel like they’re managing to sell that story particularly well, currently. Broadly the public aren’t coming down on the side of the economy. Although this may be starting to erode. Links to how we talk about climate as well. We will need to erode the sense that the economy is separate from society - health, jobs and economy are fundamentally connected to each other. Emphasise interconnectedness more in our narratives.
What’s good for the economy is bad for climate and vice versa. This further example of binary thinking is likely to be strengthened with …
Individual responsibility vs common-but-differentiated responsibility. Whilst public narratives re: the pandemic have centred heavily on individual responsibility, we will need to steer away from that where possible, given how damaging this framing has been historically by deflecting responsibility from the government, corporations and the fossil fuel industry.

Other key battleground areas that are linked to climate justice:

Scape-goating: we can already see the scapegoating of vulnerable populations happening in full swing (e.g. homeless, low paid workers, migrants). Unions portrayed as blocks to school-return. State support framed as an 'addictive substance' - which people who need it for 'too long' are going to need to be 'weaned off' - Or similar framing which adds to a sense of shame for relying on state support.
Nationalism vs internationalism (each to their own vs we’re all in this together). See above in ‘shifts that might not help’.
Migration: Linked to scape-goating and the creep of nationalism—attacks on free movement, and those of us who are migrating and seeking asylum. Combined with a ramping-up of ‘good migrants’ as essential workers. This is an important battleground for justice.
Democratic processes = burdensome: / unnecessary red tape / a barrier, hurdle / getting in the way of doing what is best for the country. Cf. activist lawyers!
Resultant Power Grabs: From the Workshop (p.17) - “There are real risks in times of crisis that people engage in power grabs, for instance , the spread of disinformation to take personal advantage of the crisis, or use the crisis as an opportunity to implement policies that limit people’s access to information. How we frame the pandemic can bolster or prevent these attempts. During the H1N1 pandemic, communications in some countries emphasised individualism, individual responsibility and reified the nation state. Any framing that draws on nationhood, individualism, war and defence, tends to surface anti-democratic solutions and place limitations on people’s freedom and information. Research shows these frames get amplified into the media space.³ Avoid them.”

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WHAT’S NEXT?

1. Further research & testing:

Exploring alternative ways of bringing historic responsibility into the frame, connecting colonialism and climate.
Unpacking the role of the UK in the global response to the climate crises.
Tracking the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and the Movement for Black LIves on public thinking.

2. Sharing our learnings:

Sharing our resources (online/print)
Running workshops - with you and your groups & organisations?

4. Supporting the community & wider movement.

3. Co-creating new comms tools for the wider public.

1. Further Research:

Taking stock of how people in the UK think (or don’t think) about climate justice, we have several key areas that we believe need more exploration.

Most importantly: historical responsibility and the connection between colonialism and climate change. �It seems that people in the UK do not have a strong analysis of how the UK’s Imperial past has helped shape today’s fossil fuel economy. There seems to be very little understanding of how colonialism has been vastly environmentally and socially destructive; how this extractive mindset forged the economy we have today; and how the people and places that were colonised suffer climate impacts in multiple ways. �We’ve already seen some of the conflicting beliefs that could lead people to reject this perspective, such as the idea of ‘innocent industrialisation’ or the belief in other principles of responsibility, like ‘responsibility is pegged to current emissions’, which tends to lead people to point the finger at emerging economies. We need more insight on what else blocks people from adopting a perspective of historical responsibility. Is there an educational gap that can simply be bridged with information? Are there emotional blocks - such as a resistance to identifying our own ancestors as being ‘to blame’?
Perhaps in part because people do not draw on historical responsibility or colonialism to understand the roots of the climate crisis, we found another big area to explore further: perceptions of the UK’s role on the global stage. �In our research, people seemed to look outside the UK both for blame, preferring to name China and India, and also for leadership, preferring to look, for instance, to the United States. In both cases it was more nuanced and complex than this - people do see that there is both blame and potential leadership for many actors and countries, at many levels of power, wealth and influence. But it wasn’t clear that people had a clear sense of what the UK could or should be doing as part of the global response to climate change. We would like more understanding of the perceived role of the UK.
We also need to track how the pandemic and the Movement for Black Lives continue to affect public thinking. In particular, there is exciting potential for huge shifts in public consciousness of historical oppression, which can help the climate justice movement. Now might be the moment to cement key pillars of climate justice: to introduce colonialism more firmly into the debate, and to show how climate change, like many other crises, will only multiply oppression unless justice is a non-negotiable part of our solutions.

2. Sharing our learnings:

Sharing our write-up and resources, which I’ll let you know more about in a moment!
Running workshops hosted by the project team and members of the community - with you and your groups & organisations?

3. Co-Creating new comms tools for the wider public:

There are also folks on the project that have got some fantastic creative comms ideas up their sleeves for putting these framing recommendations into practice. We’d love to get resources to them to bring these ideas to life: creating videos, graphics, comment-pieces and more, for engaging with the wider public.

4. Supporting the wider movement:

The project team at PIRC NEON and 350 hope to be able to offer further support to this project community, and the wider movement, going forward. Whether that be providing coaching and accompaniment to members of the project community and folks that are new to doing this work, or getting resources to those that have been doing this work for years but have faced barriers and been under-resourced.

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JOIN US!

We’re seeking funding…

hannah@publicinterest.org.uk

However, as we draw this first phase of the project to a close, we’re coming to the end of our project funding.

And so we’re on the hunt for resources and support in order to:

… dig in to those research questions that were thrown up in this first phase;
… support folks from the community to run workshops and offer support to organisations looking to deepen their work on this, and to be able to offer free support to grassroots groups facing barriers to access this support;
… get resources to members of the project community and the grassroots climate justice movement for creating new justice-centred comms materials and content.

Climate Justice work and support for grassroots leadership is seriously underfunded.

If you can help, please join us! Contact me on hannah@publicinterest.org.uk, to find out more.

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Website�framingclimatejustice.org��Where you’ll find...
Research Briefing
Presentation Slides
More soon...

RESOURCES

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THANKS!

GET IN TOUCH�hannah@publicinterest.org.uk