Climate Justice Communication: Strategies from U.S. Climate Activists

ABSTRACT

Despite the rise of climate justice movements worldwide, climate justice concerns are insufficiently addressed in recent U.S. policy, and public understanding is not yet widespread. To explore possible avenues for climate justice communication, this analysis examines U.S. climate activists’ recommended target audiences and communication strategies. Drawing on 67 conversational interviews and 112 online surveys with activists, the analysis discusses strategies for engaging two high-priority audiences: (1) social justice advocates who do not see the climate crisis as a justice issue and (2) climate action advocates who do not view climate justice as integral to climate solutions. The analysis also identifies a low-priority audience category of climate justice deniers, or people who—independent of their views on the climate crisis itself—are apathetic to its social justice implications. These results propose a novel audience segmentation for climate justice communication and consolidate activists’ recommendations for engaging each audience, thus providing a grounding for further experimental work.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate justice
• climate change
• climate action
• social movements
• denial
• United States

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The interview data associated with this study is available through the Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/27FO2A.

Notes

1 See the comment section of Klein’s (2021) Breitbart article for more examples of this discourse. https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/11/07/black-trees-matter-vp-kamala-harris-asks-nasa-can-track-trees-race-environmental-justice/

2 This term has been contested through alternative formulations such as (M)anthropocene, which highlights gendered inequalities (MacGregor, 2019), Capitalocene, which names capitalism as a driving force of climate change (Moore, 2017), and Plantationocene, which highlights “the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor.” (Haraway, 2015, p. 162).

3 Though the recruitment materials and selection process invited “climate justice organizers” to participate, analysis of the data revealed that some participants were only ideologically aligned with, rather substantively involved in, climate justice organizing. For this reason, I focus the analysis on data shared by organizers most clearly active in climate justice work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSF SBE postdoctoral fellowship under Award Number 2103697.