Conditions of change: conditionals in climate change communication (ClimCond)

ClimCond contributes knowledge on constructive ways to communicate about the climate crisis, which may circumvent psychological distance towards climate change and accelerate the green transition. 

Unlike weather, climate is an entirely abstract phenomenon. This makes it difficult to fully appreciate the climate crisis in climatically safe Global North countries. Furthermore, the abstractness constitutes a huge difficulty for drivers of the green transition to communicate about the urgency of mitigative action.

Our analyses pay special attention to the usage and processing of a very particular type of linguistic format, that is, conditional utterances that connect current (in)action with future consequences. For example, “flooding will become part of everyday life unless climate action is taken to protect the planet”. We refer to such utterances as climate action conditionals (CACs). ClimCond deploys different strands of linguistic approaches to encompass an exhaustive scrutiny of Danish CACs, and to test the hypothesis that this format exhibits strong potential to rhetorically a) advance or delay transition, and cognitively b) decrease or increase psychological distance to climate change.

We examine how CACs are designed and used in authentic talk-in-interaction in ways that embodies or transgresses psychological distance; how CACs can be digitally annotated and are distributed across communicative settings in society; and how CACs are received and understood by different individuals, for example in terms of susceptibility towards high-threat versus low-threat communication.