Feeling the Heat: The Challenge of Communicating ‘High-End’ Climate Change

Paris Agreement notwithstanding, the slim chances that global mean temperature rise can be kept below the 1.5 °C/2 °C international objectives continue to diminish. This unwelcome reality, and growing evidence of limits to adaptation, mean that citizens as well as elite decision makers need to engage with knowledge about the likelihood and implications of severe future impacts, and the scale of mitigation required to avoid them, the likes of which few want to hear. This paper seeks lessons in the existing literature that could inform communication efforts in an era of impending high-end climate change, and uses the outputs of a specially convened workshop to highlight both the scale of the challenge, and elements of an emerging new agenda. To be more than mere ‘narrators of doom’, and promote more adaptive strategies, it argues that communicators must recognise the need for ‘active hope’, constructed from realistic goals, imaginable paths, and a meaningful role for individuals within a collective response to problems at hand. New, more dialogical forms of communication, with various audiences in a range of venues are needed, in which new high-end climate messages can be conveyed and processed with citizens and decision makers. Ideally, these processes should be facilitated by highly skilled teams. These innovative forms of communication will require significant additional investment and training.