A tale of two cities
Please sir, can I have some more specifics?
Not London
Two industry events last month - one in Cannes, the other in London - tackled the role of communications in addressing the climate crisis. Both were well worth attending. But both also fell short in one important way.
The Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity is the world’s pre-eminent shindig for advertising, marketing and PR people. London Climate Action Week, which took place right afterwards, is an emerging global confab for climate types.
Both events recognised the importance of narrative, or storytelling, in addressing climate change, although at Cannes it came a distant third after AI and “the work”. As a PR guy, the fact that climate communications was on the agenda at both events was gratifying. But at both, narrative for narrative’s sake seemed* to be the order of the day, rather than storytelling in support of specific things, like practical, concrete actions needed to drive change on a systemic and global scale.
*Before going any further, an admission that I’m making some sweeping, generalised statements based on the sessions and roundtables I attended at these two events. As a first timer at both, I wasn’t particularly well-networked and so probably missed some great meetings, presentations and conversations. This take is based purely on what I saw, heard, and occasionally contributed to.
For the brand and communications crowd at Cannes, the discussion about narrative tended to focus on the questions “Why aren’t more people taking action?”, “What do we need to say,” and “How do we need to say it to make change happen?”
Few people at the climate-related sessions at Cannes seemed to have much to say about the pros and cons of practical climate solutions, much less the economic realities of implementing them. Climate content defaulted instead to some impressive creative work dramatizing the climate challenge, protest tactics (like boycotting fossil fuel companies), and the technical details of advertising’s own carbon footprint.
What seemed to be missing was an honest appraisal of the costs to the environment of promoting the consumption of carbon-intensive goods and services, the need for practical climate solutions in public policy, or the potential for (and arguably the responsibility of) the world’s best storytellers and persuaders to convince the public to support such policies.
For the climate crowd at London Climate Action Week, discussions seemed to focus on the questions: “Why don’t people understand how much progress has been made?” and “Why are people still so negative?”
As in Cannes, conversations seemed to shy away from the economic realities of climate policies and how to address them. Many participants seemed to expect that merely spinning a “better narrative” could persuade regular people to pay the costs of climate-friendlier policies, or make investors swallow a higher cost of capital.
A published summary of one closed-door roundtable I attended is telling: “The current climate narrative is not connecting with audiences, and we need to find new ways to make climate issues engaging, relatable, and resonate.” Yet it’s simply not true that the climate issue isn’t connecting with audiences. Survey after survey suggests the vast majority of people in major economies not only recognise the climate challenge, but also want their governments to do more about it.
Narrative is vital, but the climate “issue” is effectively a done deal. The minority that’s not already convinced probably won’t be until climate change comes for them (a fate getting closer every day).
A new climate narrative, addressing solutions, systems and change
What’s needed instead—and what was absent from the sessions I attended at Cannes or London—is a grown-up conversation about solutions, systems, and change. From that, a new narrative is possible that directly enables the progress the world needs.
Let’s start with solutions. Practical solutions. There were more than a few valuable climate solutions talked about in both locations, ranging from advertising industry measures to gauge emissions of every ad published to small, modular nuclear reactors that could bring clean power to every data centre in the world. Lingering in the background, however, was the unasked question: what are the commercial or economic imperatives that will lead to mass adoption? We need a narrative focused on climate solutions rather than problems, but it also needs to address the practicalities of implementation.
This leads to a conversation about systems.
While few would suggest that there’s a silver bullet that can solve the climate challenge, I heard very little about an obvious corollary: that this systemic challenge needs systemic solutions. It’s hard to convince people to advocate for greener consumption if, as one panellist in Cannes put it, they can’t afford to feed their children. It’s difficult to make voluntary carbon markets work, as I heard at a Climate Action Week roundtable, when the price of carbon remains artificially low. And you can’t expect advertising and PR agencies to voluntarily refuse work from the fossil fuel industry, a cause for which a Cannes workshop tried to create a roadmap, when their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders is to maximise profits.
The new climate narrative must therefore move beyond relying on eye-catching innovations and voluntary action and recognise the need for systemic change to enable solutions to be implemented at scale.
This requires change at the public policy level. Forecasts already make very clear that private action, whether by individual consumers or large corporations—even on a global scale—will not be sufficient. The new climate narrative must therefore focus on converting people’s awareness of the climate problem into action on a public scale. What are the actual policies voters should lobby their governments to adopt? More specifically, what policies would address climate change without making regular people worse off (or overthrowing capitalism)? Even better, what policies would actually make people better off financially.
Regular readers will already know which public policy I think has the most potential – putting a price on carbon pollution. But it’s not the only one. Better regulation is another. If you’re uncomfortable with fossil-fuel advertising, for example, lobby for legislation to prohibit it (as a group of organisations in the UK is now doing). Banning fossil-fuel ads is hardly a systemic solution, but it at least goes one important step further than arbitrary voluntary action. Another example: smarter public investment in critical green infrastructure that the private sector struggles to fund.
But this piece isn’t about the pros and cons of specific public policy changes. It’s about the need for climate advocates in both climate and advertising/PR bubbles to focus on devising a much more practical, change-oriented narrative that brings the pros and cons of systemic solutions and public policy to the fore.
Hard times call for hard choices. Unless the mainstream climate narrative moves beyond the problem and starts simplifying and selling the specifics of practical solutions, it will continue to disappoint.