Climate Fiction: A Promising Way of Communicating Climate Change with the General Public

Abstract

Since anthropogenic climate change was first noticed in the late 1980s, despite scientists’ consensus on its urgency and seriousness with strong evidence, climate risk is still a tough issue for the public to engage with due to its ambiguity, invisibility and uncertainty. This article reviews the emotive and empathetic role of climate fiction (cli-fi) in climate change communication, using the precautionary principle of relevance to sustainable development to discuss how cli-fi has influenced the way people feel and think about climate change and further foster pro-environmental attitudes and opinions. Through discussing the effectiveness of cli-fi as a communication tool, I argue that cli-fi allows readers to visualise the implications of climate change on themselves and triggers their empathetic and emotional responses, especially negative emotions. Those emotions, on the one hand, could arouse a wider and deeper climate consciousness by inspiring audiences to consider previously unnoticed subjects; on the other hand, could facilitate affective engagement and the perceived need for action.

Identifying the Active Ingredients of Climate Change Narratives: A Model of Temporal Perspective, Narrator Perspective, and Psychological Distance

“…Such heightened transportation may serve to reduce hypothetical, spatial, and temporal psychological distances, as they are situated within the unfolding events, feeling that the depicted consequences are occurring in close proximity and in the present moment. Empirically, Liu and Yang have examined the association between transportation and psychological distance in both environmental and health contexts, and found that transportation experience can make the recipients perceive the health and environmental threats as temporally closer (Liu & Yang, 2020, 2023.…”

“…Recently, scholars have been calling for leveraging the power of narrative to communicate science and environmental issues due to its characteristics of being concrete, comprehensible, and engaging (Cooper & Nisbet, 2016; Dahlstrom, 2014; Schneider-Mayerson et al, 2023). The term “cli-fi” (climate fiction) was even created to acknowledge the effective role of narratives in climate change communication (Rong, 2023).…”

“…Recently, scholars have been calling for leveraging the power of narrative to communicate science and environmental issues due to its characteristics of being concrete, comprehensible, and engaging (Cooper & Nisbet, 2016;Dahlstrom, 2014;Schneider-Mayerson et al, 2023). The term "cli-fi" (climate fiction) was even created to acknowledge the effective role of narratives in climate change communication (Rong, 2023). One important environmental issue, climate change, is noted to be a "super wicked problem" since the projected impacts are aggregate, abstract, and long-term (e.g., global sea-level rise by 2,100, Bushell et al, 2017;Gifford, 2011).…”