Although climate change campaigners have always prioritised the need to effectively communicate the effects of climate change through carefully selected text, it is now thought that carefully selected images are just as important.
New research from universities in the US, Australia and the UK has shown how different types of pictures make people feel about climate change and whether they feel like they can do something about it.
The research showed that images of climate impacts made people feel like climate change is important, but that there's not much they can do to stop it, whereas pictures of energy futures, such as solar panels and energy efficiency measures, were most likely to make people feel like they could do something about climate change.
However, images of celebrities and politicians who are often in the media discussing climate change, such as Richard Branson, Al Gore and Julia Gillard, "made participants in this study feel quite strongly that climate change was unimportant."
The research paper says, "Arresting, startling, attention-getting, amazing, uplifting, upsetting and even shocking images therefore have the potential to raise awareness, as well as inspire people to explore possible actions to take in the face of climate challenges."
"But in making the intangible tangible, climate imagery can also paralyse and demobilise. In making climate change meaningful through imagery, communications can act to increase or decrease peoples' sense of both issue salience (whether climate change is considered important) and their self-efficacy (a sense of being able to do anything about climate change)."
One of the paper's authors, Dr Saffron O'Neill from the University of Exeter added, "I don't think there's any ideal combination of images for engaging people with climate change, as it depends what you are trying to communicate, why you are trying to communicate it, and to whom."
He continued, "However, our study does indicate that it's important to decide first whether you are trying to increase peoples' sense of saliency, or their sense of efficacy. It appears images may be able to influence one, but none of the images seemed to be able to do both."
Perhaps Greenpeace should reconsider using One Direction to back their campaign on conserving the Arctic...
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