Today’s guest blog comes from Elizabeth Rose, climate activist, researcher, and writer, who shares insights from their research exploring public opinion on solutions to the climate crisis.
Last year, climate change was ranked the fourth most important issue facing the UK by the British public. Yet when activists call for stronger climate action, nearly everyone agrees they’re going about it in the ‘wrong way’. But is there a ‘right way’? This research canvassed the opinions of the British public about different climate advocacy methods, to establish whether there is any consensus on the best way to advocate for better climate policies in the UK.
The research was based on the responses of 187 respondents to an online self-completion survey, and the sample group was deliberately broad - ‘residents of the UK’ - to allow for patterns to emerge across demographics in the data. Owing to time and cost limitations within the remit of an MA dissertation, a non-probability sampling method was employed, and respondents were selected through opportunity sampling and snowball sampling, with each person who completed the survey sharing it in their networks.
The research found that there was no consensus on which methods are effective to secure climate policies in the UK. The closest thing to a ‘right’ method of climate advocacy was voting (for a party with green goals), with 81.8% of respondents rating it as at least somewhat effective, and 21.9% as highly effective. This was followed by becoming a journalist (79.7% and 23.5%, respectively), and donating to environmental organisations (77% and 19.2%). All three ‘right’ methods were, significantly, characterised by their non-disruptive nature.
There were some differences of opinion between sub groups. Younger respondents thought disruptive methods were more effective compared to older respondents, and they saw non-disruptive methods as less effective. People’s level of concern about climate also made a difference; there was a positive correlation between level of concern and a higher perception of effectiveness across all of the twenty-one methods.
Interestingly, the method ranked most ‘highly effective’ was ‘several methods in combination’, suggesting that while no single action stands out, efforts that combine a range of approaches are seen as the most impactful.
When respondents were asked specifically about their perception of the effectiveness of peaceful protest, opinion was split nearly exactly in half. There seems to be deep uncertainty about how effective one of the most popular forms of civil resistance in the UK really is.
A vast majority of respondents (89.9%) believed that direct, disruptive, actions were at least somewhat justifiable, despite very few perceiving them as effective. This is the crux of a paradox: most people in the UK agree we need change, and are justified in asking for it, but have no idea how to effectively demand it. This uncertainty can engender the belief that those protesting and taking direct action are wasting their time which might discourage others from taking action themselves. This is unfortunate because, though the impacts of direct action on policy change are hard to trace, there is a growing body of research that shows direct action can be effective in securing policy changes.
Over a third of respondents (33.7%) thought that becoming an MP was at least sometimes effective, the highest level of agreement on the degree to which any method works. By contrast, 66.3 percent of respondents thought that pouring food or paint on monuments was ineffective. There is double the agreement on what does not work than what does.
These figures are in keeping with YouGov survey research that found ‘78% of the UK public thinks that disruptive protest hinders the cause’. But they diverge from the perceptions of social movement experts; in Social Change Lab’s survey of 120 academic experts, they found that 69% of experts believed ‘that disruptive tactics [are] effective at progressing the cause for issues like climate change that have high public awareness and high public support’.
In this way, the results indicate that the British climate movement has stalled, somewhere near the peak of an issue attention cycle. Awareness and concern around climate change are high, and climatic anomalies are too regular for the issue to again decline in public interest, yet the majority of people in the UK don’t know how to effectively demand change.
This signals a failure in climate communications. Despite having been successful in spreading awareness and generating high public concern around climate change, our climate communications have not successfully put forward clear policy solutions or outlined what actions concerned people can take to effectively demand these policy changes.
The task now is to frame communications to harness high public concern without making people feel too overwhelmed or as if the challenge is too big, while still acknowledging the gravity and urgency of the situation at hand. Dasandi et al (2022) have shown that positive communications framings, that focus on opportunities rather than risks, ‘increase the likelihood of public support for climate policies’. Therefore, while increasing non-expert awareness of climate change is still important, if we want to build popular support for climate policies, our communications need to raise awareness of climate solutions too.
For the movement to progress, our communications urgently need to present clear descriptions of the policies we need. Then they need to show people that taking action through various means, but especially in combination, can be justified and effective in securing policy change.
Contact Elizabeth about this research on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-rose-2b1204204/
Image at top by Pierre Bamin, Unsplash 09-20-2019. Available here.
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