Stories about change
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“That if we continued providing the scientific papers, that for some miraculous reason, leaders would read the papers.” “When I was an academic, I thought that science was all we needed,” he said in an interview on the podcast Outrage and Optimism. But that did not happen so Sala left academia. He thought that his increasingly alarming reports on the state of the world’s oceans would spur policy makers into action. Improving science communicationĮnric Sala spent years as a university professor, doing research on ocean life. Global News looks at Canadian attitudes and beliefs about climate change. This growing concern over the personal impacts of climate change represents an excellent opportunity for journalists, policy makers and environmental advocates to localize and personalize climate communication to engage people more effectively through the power of storytelling.Īs important as it is to communicate information about the impacts of climate change, it is also important to include stories that people can relate to and draw inspiration from. This past spring, that had risen to 34 per cent. In 2015, 27 per cent of Canadians felt “very concerned” that the climate crisis was going to affect them personally. In Canada, concern about the personal impacts of climate change has risen seven percentage points over the past six years. Around the world, more people are starting to agree that the climate crisis is not just a distant threat, but one that will affect them personally and directly. Climate change can still feel abstract, personal and even distant.īut that is rapidly changing. As urgent as it is, the climate crisis does not always garner the same attention as other topics, such as COVID-19 or the economy. Sabine Roeser, an ethics researcher, investigates the role of emotions in communicating climate change: “ Emotions are generally considered to be irrational states and are hence excluded from communication and political decision making.”Įmotions, Roeser argues, play a very important role in how people engage with risk. Traditionally, emotions have been seen as separate from rational judgment. Stories have the power to transform complex subject matters into something that feels personal, local, relatable and solvable.īut stories about the climate crisis – for example, about how people are responding in real time and making a difference – are still few and far between. The best tool at our disposal is a simple one: storytelling. We situate ourselves within the big stories of our culture and find our place in time and space.We need to rethink the way we communicate climate change. Through creating, revising and sharing stories, we come to understand our experiences as both unique and not-unique. We work with different kinds of stories – fiction, autobiography, song, testimony, oral history, memoir, personal narrative. The power of individual stories is evident in phenomena as diverse as the Fort MacMurray fire or the #MeToo movement, where individual stories about survival,danger and justice drove broader systemic and collective responses. Large or sudden transformations become meaningful as we tell ourselves and each other stories about our individual experiences. Stories are how people make sense out of change. In particular, we are interested in the interface between stories of individual lives and large-scale changes. We are a constellation of award-winning researchers across the humanities, social sciences and fine arts at the University of Alberta, whose intellectual projects are moved forward by stories. Stories of Change is a research network in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta.