Flipping the Ratio

For the past 15 years, my work has directly and indirectly explored how we communicate climate change to the general public. As a way to build my own personal toolkit for this work, I occasionally attend trainings designed to help others talk about climate change. The other day I was doing some digital housekeeping and ran across some of my initial notes and reflections of a training I experienced five years ago. It reminded me of why a lighter approach to climate work is needed now more than ever. 

Image created by Gemini AI

The training took place online over three days and consisted of a mix of live talks, small discussion groups, asynchronous content, and a few “homework” assignments, like writing our personal “climate story.” The whole thing was anchored by an impressive set of slides featuring evocative images, accessible charts and statistics, and top notch production quality.

It began with the basic science behind climate change. So far so good. Then, it took a turn towards the exhausting. Over the next two and a half days, we looked at how and where climate change is impacting the world: forests, oceans, glaciers, rising seas, warmer temperatures, spread of disease vectors, animal migration, and human health. …Phew! That was heavy. Wait, there’s more??... Environmental justice, more rain, less rain, more snow, less snow, water shortages, climate refugees…Holy smokes! I’m ready to crawl into a hole...political instability, extinction events, extreme weather, loss of infrastructure, cost to the economy, ocean acidification, agricultural impacts... you get the point. Exhausting. 

To be fair, there was some content that focused on positive trends like renewable energy sources, electric vehicles, green jobs, regenerative agriculture and encouraging social and political movements. Yet, these all seemed to be ancillary to the main message conveyed, if implicitly, throughout the training: We’re screwed. 

Make no mistake, all of these topics are important and worthy of their own training. But it wasn’t the topics touched on over the course of three days that I struggled with, it was the ratio of problem-based content to solutions-based content. Upon completion of the training I’ve been writing about, participants were generously given permission to use the 600 (600!) or so slides in their own climate presentations. (Full disclosure: I have gladly used some of them.) The slides were in a roughly 4:1 ratio of those depicting the devastating impacts of climate change to those depicting promising climate solutions. 

I can’t speak for the hundreds of other participants in this training from around the world, but personally, this doom-heavy ratio ended up leaving me feeling drained and demoralized. Many of the other 10 participants in my small discussion group voiced similar feelings. 

The focus on the impacts and consequences of climate change is not exclusive to this particular training – it’s prevalent within climate communication and engagement work. I’ll be the first to admit that I, too, am guilty of giving talks and hosting workshops that focused on doom and gloom. Judging by the look on the faces of attendees at my early events, people appeared anxious, demoralized, and well, just done with the whole shit show. There is a chance that I inadvertently scared or guilted them into switching to LED bulbs or flirting with a less meat-centric diet, but I'm unsure whether my doom and gloom approach motivated anyone for the type of sustained, collective climate action we need. More likely is that I frightened them away from engaging more deeply with the problem.

When we experience situations that are threatening, a tiny, almond-shaped structure in the brain called the amygdala goes to work. The amygdala triggers our fight, flight, or freeze responses– responses that have evolved to be quick, protective, and occur without much deep thinking involved. They are intended to move us away from the edge of a cliff or prepare us to fight off the mountain lion that is stalking us. When our amygdala is going berserk, the solutions our brains (rightly) jump to involve a narrow set of actions motivated by self-preservation. 

What we need to respond to climate change, though, is the opposite. We need to take a step back, calm our brains, and be able to consider a wide-range of creative solutions and opportunities that exist. In my climate engagement work, I've found that helping people create a future vision full of possibility and opportunity rather than scarcity and despair motivates them to keep talking about climate, and more importantly, encourages them to think about what they can do to bring a better future closer to reality.

So what if, when designing our climate engagement work, we intentionally thought about  flipping the 4:1 impacts to solutions ratio on its head? I'm not saying we should be all rainbows and unicorns about climate change or steep our work in toxic positivity; however, instead of sensationalizing the plethora of climate impacts, what if the bulk of our communications and training efforts positioned climate change as an opportunity to rethink the way society operates so that all beings can thrive? What if it helped people envision and talk about what they are most looking forward to in the future if we get this right? What if we help participants envision a future worth running toward, not away from?