Warm Words: How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better?

Putting in place effective policies to stimulate climate-friendly behaviour in the UK is clearly essential, but so too is the use of effective communications. Today in the UK, more stakeholders, including every type of media outlet, the Government, environmental groups and companies, are discussing or communicating on climate change than ever before. But what impact are these stakeholders having? Are they helping or hindering efforts to achieve behaviour change? Will producing more of the same communications do the job, and if not, how could the way climate change is communicated be improved?

To help answer those questions, ippr commissioned Linguistic Landscapes to analyse current UK constructions and conceptions of climate change in the public domain, using some of the tools and principles of discourse analysis and semiotics.

This report was commissioned by the ippr as part of our project on how to stimulate climate-friendly behaviour in the UK.