Creative (Climate) Communications: Productive Pathways for Science, Policy and Society

Description

Conversations about climate change at the science-policy interface and in our lives have been stuck for some time. This handbook integrates lessons from the social sciences and humanities to more effectively make connections through issues, people, and things that everyday citizens care about. Readers will come away with an enhanced understanding that there is no 'silver bullet' to communications about climate change; instead, a 'silver buckshot' approach is needed, where strategies effectively reach different audiences in different contexts. This tactic can then significantly improve efforts that seek meaningful, substantive, and sustained responses to contemporary climate challenges. It can also help to effectively recapture a common or middle ground on climate change in the public arena. Readers will come away with ideas on how to harness creativity to better understand what kinds of communications work where, when, why, and under what conditions in the twenty-first century.

Maxwell Boykoff is Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy, which is part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also an associate professor in the Environmental Studies program at the University of Colorado. Boykoff has ongoing interests in cultural politics and environmental governance, science and environmental communications, science-policy interactions, political economy and the environment, and climate adaptation. He has authored many peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and books in these subjects, including Who Speaks for the Climate?: Making Sense of Media Reporting on Climate Change (Cambridge, 2011).

'This book appears at first to be a collection of buzzwords, adages, random thoughts, and quotations strung together using loose grammar and imprecise adverbs. There is more to it, however. Boykoff... delivers a strong argument that opposition to climate action cannot be overcome by lecturing about the science. He also provides many examples of innovative communication regarding climate science as facilitated by humor, whether the medium is video or work presented live on stage ... Additionally, the author supplies comprehensive citations to the literature on science communications. This alone makes the volume potentially helpful to PhD students, but Boykoff further offers an extensive discussion of the relationship between science and advocacy, making a useful distinction between advocating for acceptance of scientific findings and for the adoption of particular policies.' J. C. Berg, Choice