Action in the UK - Communicating climate change
Increasing awareness and understanding of climate change is important if ultimately we are going to be able to change behaviours to tackle the problem. In 2005 Defra led in the development of a cross-Governmental initiative to tell the story of climate change and to inspire collective action. The focus of the Climate Change Communications Initiative in the first instance was to change attitudes. The goal for this initiative was: "Together this generation will tackle climate change."
The initiative provided free-to-use resources including a short film about climate change, a series of radio adverts, animations and a downloadable written guide about communicating climate change.
In 2007 the Government developed the ACT ON CO2 brand. All public engagement work on climate change is now branded as ACT ON CO2. More information on the ACT ON CO2 campaign can be found on Directgov.
The Climate Change Communications Initiative remains a record of work carried out between 2005 and 2007.
Archive
Archives of the former website at "climatechallenge.gov.uk" are available on the UK National Archives website.
Background to this initiative
The launch of this initiative follows work carried out for Defra by consultants Futerra. The following resources helped inform this.
Futerra's report
- Recommendations for a UK communications strategy on climate change (400 KB)
- Executive summary (80 KB)
- Further recommendations for a Climate Change Fund (80 KB)
- Further recommendations for Large Scale National Activities (100 KB)
- Overview of recommendations from the strategy (60 KB)
The strategy is strongly evidence-based, and key findings from this research are contained in:
- Evidence base "Rules of the Game" (240 KB)
- Evidence base "Rules of the Game" summary version. This has useful tips for effective climate change communications (50 KB)
Additional background
- Research on public attitudes to climate change (Appendix 1) (460 KB)
- Stakeholder consultation - evidence from consultation with key stakeholders (Appendix 2) (60 KB)
Implementation
- Measurement - desk based research on measuring communication devices (Appendix 3) (40 KB)
- Creative ideas, decision making criteria and process - the process of deciding whether an idea makes it into a communications toolkit (Appendix 4) (200 KB)
Page last modified: 20 March 2008
Page published: 1 December 2005