This seminar is part of the Climate Cookies & Coffee series of the Belgian Climate Centre. This seminar series was launched to foster knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and interdisciplinary discussion among climate researchers.
For this edition, the Belgian Climate Centre will welcome Anais Augé (Université catholique de Louvian) for an overview of public reception, argumentation, and imaginaries on climate communication.
Abstract:
This presentation will give us the opportunity to reflect on the public reception of climate communication. Indeed, international institutions, like the IPCC and the United Nations, have recently underscored the need to convey environmental messages in a way that would favour awareness and limit confusion. Yet climate communication also rests on public knowledge, expectations, and opinions. Therefore, this presentation proposes to consider not only the production of discourse, but also the variety of responses to such a discourse. This investigation will thus enable us to gain more knowledge into the communicative features which can trigger endorsement or backlash from the public.
To this aim, the presentation will focus on five key arenas involved in climate communication: science, politics, activism, marketing, and art. The presentation will review the existing communicative patterns and concerns that prevail within each arena (for example, can scientific communication about climate change involve environmental arguments?). It will highlight the prevalence of two main communicative features that have been associated with climate miscommunication, namely, metaphors and argumentation. On the one hand, metaphors prevail in everyday discourse as they help to describe a complex concept through the lens of a familiar concept (e.g. the amount of carbon emissions is shaped as a footprint, through the metaphorical expression "carbon footprint"). Yet this process entails a partial and subjective perception of climate concepts. On the other hand, argumentation distinguishes between different parties, opinions, prospects and rhetorical aspirations. Thus, climate arguments may ultimately generate public debates and counterarguments.
Therefore, this presentation will delineate the factors that have promoted resistance to climate communication from the public. It will not only consider questionable or ambiguous uses of communicative features, but it will also assess the contextual influences (e.g. polycrisis) on the public's appreciation of climate communication.