Communicating science to motivate action: A case study of birds and climate change

Abstract

Climate change is an existential threat to biodiversity and people, but building political will for action on climate change remains elusive. Research on climate change communications to increase effectiveness at motivating action include these recommendations: pairing risk and opportunity in message framing, localizing information, and appealing to a sense of place. Here, we present a case study on mobilizing bird enthusiasts to take action on climate change. The science communicated found that over two-thirds of North American birds are moderately or highly vulnerable to climate change under a 3.0°C warming scenario. Of these climate-vulnerable species, 76% would have reduced vulnerability if warming were stabilized at 1.5°C. These findings were summarized and communicated with the public in an award-winning interactive website, the “Birds and Climate Visualizer,” that allowed individuals to look up any location by postal ZIP code and learn what birds would be impacted by climate. Also included was a Climate Action Handbook providing sample personal actions. The communications rollout earned 2.5 billion media impressions, the visualizer has been used at least 42,000 times, and handbook circulated to 250,000 households. More than 33,000 people read headlines from the report or explored the visualizer and then completed an online action in support of clean energy policies. The message frame combined with the visualizer and handbook as tools to deliver the frame have contributed to climate legislative wins in four states. These early successes suggest that message and visual online tools that localize and personalize a message are effective to motivate action.

Mainstreaming Coastally Just and Equitable Marine Spatial Planning: Planner and Stakeholder Experiences and Perspectives on Participation in Latvia

“…A collaborative MSP adopts a co-production approach, by exploring localized sustainability issues, threats, options, opportunities, and solutions with, not for, communities. The argument for this is that people are more motivated to act and learn more when a large sustainability issue is framed locally, for instance how climate change negatively affects the birds that people are accustomed to seeing in their surroundings (Wilsey et al, 2022) or how communities perceive or are socially and economically affected by ocean interventions, including MSP (Flannery et al, 2019;Leong et al, 2019), ocean conservation (Mann-Lag et al, 2021) and climate mitigation e.g., offshore wind energy (Tafon et al, 2019a). A collaborative process also engages with the broader environmental justice community (e.g., local and international NGOs, youth, and scholar activists) and offers better opportunities for agonism (honesty, passion, trust, mutual respect, community learning and empowerment), which is useful for depolarization of positions, co-production of knowledge and action, and transformation of unsustainable practices and institutions (Tafon et al, 2022;Bennett et al, 2021).…”

“…can address key barriers to participation, such as time, logistics, and difficulties to express oneself orally or in public. Furthermore, methods such as citizen science (Flannery et al, 2019), participatory GIS and mapmaking (Trouillet 2019), serious gaming (Abspoel et al, 2021) storytelling, online surveys and data localization (Wilsey et al, 2022), arts-based approaches (Strand et al, 2022) and beach walks can facilitate better community engagement and joint sense-making in ocean planning and action. Importantly, the methods used must be accessible to all, appropriate for the purpose of the engagement, and evaluated and adapted in response to feedback from participants.…”

“…Impactful: Communities are interested in whether their participation in MSP is meaningful and makes a difference (Wilsey et al, 2022), which calls for learning and reflexivity to be an integral part of MSP (Toonen and van Tatenhove 2020). The impact of community engagement in MSP must be assessed, and lessons learned used to improve future community engagement processes, i.e., implementation, monitoring, and review of plans.…”