| Extreme weather | Call them “unnatural disasters” caused by fossil fuel pollution, and spell out the link explicitly, because being exposed to extreme weather doesn’t on its own build belief in climate change. Any clear wording for attributing an event to climate change works, so choose the plainest: in Yale’s tests every message raised understanding, and “3 times more likely” and “200% more likely” performed the same. | Communicating the impact of climate change on extreme weather in India, the UK and the US (Yale, 2026) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Net zero and the backlash | Public support for net zero is steady and higher than politicians think; the backlash is driven by elites and amplified by the media, while the real risks are the issue slipping down people’s priorities and opinion splitting along party lines. Describe net zero in plain outcomes, lead with its impacts, and rebut only the one argument that has real traction – that it’s unrealistic and can’t be delivered. | Apathy and opposition (IPPR, 2026); Declining urgency, enduring support (KCL, Ipsos, CAST, 2026) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Cost of living and fairness | Link the climate and cost-of-living crises to the same shared values, never concede that you have to choose between them, set upfront costs and savings side by side, and name who profits rather than who pays. Potential Energy’s 2026 guide adds five shifts: from morality to material benefits, luxury to affordability, banning to building, global to local, and massive to manageable. | 2026 Climate Change Communicators Guide: five key shifts (Potential Energy, 2026) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Hope, doom and fear | Be honest first, then hopeful, and treat hope as a sense that you can act rather than as optimism. Doom spreads but doesn’t move people; fear can raise the sense of risk among people who aren’t very concerned but can backfire with everyone else, and after a disaster the right tone is courage, not cheer. | Avoid crisis framing; balance urgency with efficacy (FrameWorks) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Denial, delay and disinformation | Treat delay (accepting the problem but arguing for slower action) and denial as separate things, and “pre-bunk” both by warning people about the tactics before they meet them. Denial now targets the solutions; test any message by asking who benefits from it and what it asks people to do. | Discourses of climate delay; The New Climate Denial | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Justice and the Global South | Present climate change as injustice on a planetary scale, not as misfortune. Start local and end global: open on UK impacts, link them to the same harm abroad (air pollution in London and Lagos, for example), and ask for solidarity rather than duty, which triggers guilt and “what about here?”. Show the system as designed, so it can be redesigned, and keep human nature out of it. UK audiences don’t yet see colonialism in the story and blame capitalism first, so join the dots through extraction and consumerism, and name countries and people rather than saying “Global South”. Put affected communities in as decision-makers, not suppliers of solutions, and count the emissions of colonial rule. Answer “what about China and India” with a fair share: every country pays for its own historic and current emissions. Framing climate migration as a threat backfires. | Framing Climate Justice (PIRC, 350.org and NEON, 2019–20); Colonial Rule Nearly Doubles UK’s Historical Contribution to Climate Change; The ‘Climate Migration’ Narrative Is Inaccurate, Harmful, and Pervasive. We Need an Alternative | 22 Oct 2026 |
| Adaptation | Always talk about adapting to climate change alongside cutting emissions (mitigation). Explain it concretely, with examples like heat-proofing homes and natural flood defences, because fewer than half of people know what “adaptation” or “resilience” mean. | How do the public engage with climate adaptation in 2026? (Climate Barometer, 2026) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Nature | Bring nature and climate together. “If we damage the natural world we damage ourselves” tests well across different audience groups, and plain nature language gets more support than climate terms. | Britain Talks Climate & Nature 2025 report (Climate Outreach, 2025); Britain Talks Climate & Nature 2025 toolkit (Climate Outreach, 2025) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Energy and fossil fuels | Talk about abundance, not sacrifice, and about upgrading and setting standards rather than bans. People tend to see fossil fuels as a worrying necessity, so blame the profiteers rather than the fuel, and be honest about the material costs of renewables. | People powering the green transition (Climate Outreach and The Young Foundation, 2025) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Health | Presenting climate change as a health issue works better than presenting it as an economic one, across countries, and it reaches people who aren’t otherwise concerned. Use concrete harms such as air pollution and unequal exposure to it. | Connecting early childhood development to climate change (FrameWorks, 2025) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Young people and children | Stop telling children they’ll die from climate change; give them a sense of agency and realistic optimism instead. Young people tend to see net zero as an opportunity and want more information about it, and they’re reached through different channels. | Gen Z(ero) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Politics and elections | Climate leadership wins votes and complacency loses them. Present climate action as protection against risk rather than as a cost, treat right-of-centre voters as people you can win over, and remember that the missing ingredient is confidence that politicians can deliver. | Apathy and opposition (IPPR, 2026); What is the climate story in 2025? (Climate Outreach and Green Alliance, 2025) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Media and journalism | Coverage is falling because news outlets are supplying less of it, not because audiences want less. When reporting setbacks, include the ingenuity alongside them, say where the majority stands rather than staging an artificial balance, and watch for sponsored fossil fuel content placed beside the reporting. | Leading News Outlets Are Doing the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Greenwashing | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Everyday conversation | Most people in Britain rarely or never talk about climate change, so the first job is giving people permission to – and in most countries polled, concerned people who think they’re in a minority are actually the majority. Use REAL TALK (respect, enjoy, ask, listen, tell your story, keep going) and remember nobody needs to be a scientist. Information travels well through weak ties (people you know only slightly), but new behaviour spreads best through tight clusters, where people see several others they know doing it and reinforce each other. | Alone together: the hidden consensus on climate change (Lloyd’s Register Foundation and UNDP, 2026) | 23 Oct 2026 |
| Film, TV and pop culture | Climate belongs in every genre. Build it into the story rather than leaving it as background detail, show a sustainable life as ordinary, and know that including climate doesn’t hurt box office. | The Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change; Climate Reality On-Screen - The Climate Crisis in Popular Films, 2013-22 | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Visuals | Show real people rather than staged photo-ops, and use less familiar images that tell new stories – no polar bears. Show causes at scale (the congested road, not the lone driver), pair images of impacts with something people can do, keep pictures local but serious, and take care with protest imagery. | Climate Visuals launches a new collection of air pollution photographs | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Behaviour and solutions | Culture, not information, is what carries behaviour, and cues that are hard to avoid shift it. Nearly half of the people most alarmed about climate change are willing to act but aren’t doing anything, so give them a clear next step. | Communicating climate solutions (Yale, 2026) | 12 Sept 2026 |
| Anxiety, grief and deeper feelings | Face climate anxiety together rather than alone: do a favour, work with your neighbours and look for joy on purpose. Grief that goes unaddressed becomes the ground populism grows on. | How to Live Meaningfully with Climate Anxiety; Beyond the flags - grief, polarisation and the work of repair | 12 Sept 2026 |