Keywords

“So, the climate is changing, what can I do?”

We keep coming back to this question in panicked late-night Google searches and heated discussions with family, friends, and colleagues. As journalists, it is one of the questions readers ask the most. This is hardly a surprise when media leaders believe a key barrier to better climate change reporting is the depressive outlook of current journalism and the powerlessness it creates in audiences (Newman, 2022).

One way to help answer “what can I do?” is for journalists to share stories of people acting right now, all around the world. By giving these concrete and actionable examples, we can put the problem into a human context, discussing the real-world difficulties people are dealing with. By telling these stories, intelligent, articulated, and available solutions can spread. By telling these stories, readers can consider how to take action in their own lives. They can feel less alone, less isolated, and less doomed.

To be clear, journalists shouldn’t stop reporting the science or the extreme weather events or the rest of the ways we report climate change. We have to keep telling this truth; it is the most important thing we do as journalists, but we can combine the climate science about cause and effect with stories of climate action. We can inform people that burning fossil fuels to power our homes contributes to climate change and tell the story of a man trying to install solar panels on his roof.

The truth is that the situation is getting worse, but people are acting to prevent it from becoming catastrophic. By telling the truth, we can acknowledge these changes and the feelings of despair many people struggle with. We can also inspire more human agency in positive change. Telling stories of climate action isn’t new. There are examples included throughout this chapter, mostly from my employer, the BBC. Let’s celebrate these stories. Then let’s assess how we can gather more and include them more consistently in reporting.

I propose three approaches. Firstly, we can tell these stories from across the newsroom and not just rely on the “science” or “climate” team. Secondly, we can engage with audiences to gather and share their own examples. Finally, we can take a systematic approach to incorporate stories of climate action at scale, by using technologies such as natural language templates that are reducing the cost of producing content while enhancing data-driven hyperlocal news reporting to promote human response and community engagement.

Climate Change Journalism

Journalism is one of the primary ways people learn about climate change, from its causes to its predicted impacts around the world. Over time, this has led to much of the scientific consensus around the topic being accepted by the public. To take my country, the UK, as an example, 67% of people support climate policies, believing that climate change is human-caused and a serious threat, and roughly half of them believe it is an urgent threat and strongly support climate policies (Leiserowitz et al., 2021). Given this acceptance of the situation, it isn’t a surprise that readers are asking journalists what they can do to help.

Often, however, the response to “what can I do” looks like a list of climate commandments: “don’t fly,” “drive less,” “drink less dairy,” “eat less beef,” and so on and so forth. To journalists the appeal is obvious. We can write a long list of suggestions for a broad audience, ostensibly addressing the question. However, for the reader, the recommendations are often impractical. Imagine it is 3 o’clock in the morning. You have just de-iced your car and you are driving through the fog to start a 10-h shift in an Amazon warehouse. How useful is the suggestion that you should take public transport to work?

Such lists also lack detail and appreciation for the trade-offs and choices involved. Don’t fly? How do you propose I travel 700 miles for a family holiday? Should I take four trains? Should I drive? Should I stay at home? It is promising that newsrooms are engaging with the questions that audiences are asking about climate change, but the response needs to be more nuanced, more personalized, and more applicable.

What Do Stories of Climate Action Look Like?

Instead of prescriptive lists, we could answer the question “what should I do” differently. We could give illustrative examples of effective solutions that people are practicing already. We could tell stories of climate mitigation and adaptation, by both individuals and groups. We could report the truth, that people are trying their best, with limited time, limited options, and limited resources. In short, we can tell our readers stories of people like them.

Such storytelling can create communities of action cutting across language barriers and geographic boundaries. As one researcher put it, “Bangladesh has a lot to teach Germany about how to deal with floods” (Whitwell, 2021). From the examples below – some real, some illustrative – it’s clear we all have a lot to learn from each other.

Climate Change Mitigation

So, there are no trains in your area to get you to work at 4 AM? Here are some stories of three people who carpool and share the cost of petrol. The three of them often argue about which radio station to listen to, but on Friday they treat themselves to a bacon sandwich with the money they save.

So, you are trying not to fly? Here is the story of a family who turned the challenge of not flying into a road trip and you know what? It was a disaster. Learn from their lessons! Pack car sickness tablets and treat yourselves to an overnight stay halfway. Here is another family who took a local holiday instead. Here is the story of a golfer who has to fly for work, but who is paying to carbon offset his flights (Carter, 2021). Want to rely less on fossil fuels to heat your home? Here is a man who saved the money to install solar panels on his roof, but who now is having trouble getting the permits from his local council. Here is the tenant who wants to insulate their rented house but is having trouble with their landlord. Do you have any suggestions to help?

These stories shouldn’t be limited to the action of single actors but put into the context of larger workplaces. Want to make a difference through your employer? Here is a hospital procurement manager who got the rules changed so she can buy food from local farmers. The radishes were so peppery they made the patient’s eyes water. Here is the software developer who reconfigured his company’s cloud computing to use less electricity. Here is the waitress who encourages her customers to take away leftover food after their meal and who convinced her employer to introduce biodegradable takeaway boxes.

Beyond workplaces, we can tell stories of volunteers planting woodland (BBC News, 2021e) or restoring peatland (BBC News 2021b). We can tell stories of farmers using government funds to rewild their land (Bowman, 2022). We can show residents using infrared cameras to discover how to better insulate their homes, with help from local government (Bradley, 2022). We can show bike-share schemes in Rwanda (BBC News, 2021d). Crucially, these stories can make people realize that there are groups they can join, steps they can take, and authorities that can assist them. They are not alone in facing climate change.

Climate Change Adaptation

When audiences ask “what can I do?”, they are often asking what they can do to prepare and adapt. They know climate change is happening, but it feels too global, too huge for many people to respond to. We have to be local when we describe climate impacts because the answer to “what can I do about climate change” differs depending on where you live. Articles that allow readers to enter their location to see how climate change manifests for them could be paired with case studies of climate adaptation (Dale & Stylianou, 2021; Fig.1).

Fig. 1
A screenshot has the following text that reads, "How could the climate change ear you? enter a full U K postcode to find out" and a search bar.

Readers can enter their location to see how global warming is predicted to alter their local climate, originally published in Dale & Stylianou (2021)

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Are you at risk of increased rainfall or flooding? Here is a floating school in Bangladesh (Beaudien, 2018). Here is a farmer reshaping a watercourse in his fields (Rebanks, 2020). Are you at risk from hotter weather? Here is a conservationist reintroducing beavers to restore rivers in the desert (Sherriff, 2021).

Introducing Stories of Climate Action into the Existing Mix of Climate Coverage

While climate action stories can do well on their own, they can also be embedded into other types of climate change coverage, such as scientific reports or predictions of the future. For example, a report of record-breaking temperatures can be accompanied by stories of people adapting to extreme heat around the world, like the story of slum residents in Ahmedabad painting their roofs white to reflect heat, after a housing association lent them the money (BBC News, 2021a), or the plans in Sydney (Lu, 2021) to follow a similar strategy.

Stories of adaptation are particularly powerful alongside climate change predictions. A report predicting increased monsoon rains and flooding can be accompanied by stories of first-time buyers considering flooding risk as they look for their first home or the psychologist who retrained to help people manage the trauma of losing their homes to flooding.

Three Ways to Unlock More Stories of Climate Action

Considering how to introduce more stories of climate action requires some introspection from the news industry, a look at the constraints we work under and the norms that guide our reporting.

Share Stories of Action Across the Newsroom

Most large newsrooms are typically split into different teams covering different topics such as education, business, and home affairs. While this setup allows journalists to develop expertise and monitor their domain closely, there are associated risks and downsides too. In particular, stories about complex issues like climate change can get siloed to small groups of journalists such as “science” or “climate” teams. Instead, they should be told across the newsroom, drawing on the domain expertise of different desks.

Stories of climate action are housing stories; how can we best insulate and power our properties (Dickins, 2021; Morton, 2021). They are investment and personal finance stories: Where should I put my pension investment and why are prices increasing (Timmins & Thomas, 2022)? They are political and legal stories: How can you exercise your rights or lobby your politicians? They are travel and transport stories, food stories (Pandey, 2021), sports stories (Stanton et al., 2021), community stories, education stories, and employment stories (Bearne, 2022). Sharing these stories can create curiosity and hope and even spark new ideas.

The pool of examples can be further broadened by directly connecting individual stories with the larger context not initially conceived as climate change stories. The entrepreneur working to get unwanted food to the hungry is also helping with climate change (Rose, 2022). People installing a smart meter to measure their electricity usage at home are saving money and reducing their emissions.

Ask Readers for Examples of Climate Action

One barrier to telling more stories of climate action is cost. These stories are perceived as expensive to collect by media leaders keeping an eye on travel expenses (Newman, 2022) and how newsroom staff are spending their time. Even if a particular story doesn’t involve leaving the building there is an opportunity cost. Finding people, interviewing them, and putting their actions in a relevant context eat time that could be used for other types of reporting. As a journalist, should you spend half a day with a person talking about their allotment or instead turn a scientific report into an article? My hope is that we can do both, by asking readers to share their experiences with us as case studies. Not only does this reduce the cost of story collection, it is an effective way to broaden and diversify the stories we find and tell.

The BBC has its own user-generated content team and we’ve used platforms like Hearken to allow readers to ask questions or suggest stories for a number of years. For climate change specifically, it allows readers to also engage, comment, and question suggested solutions. Say there is a deluge of stories about people getting electric vehicles or heat pumps, audience questions and feedback will quickly reveal what is preventing these solutions being taken up by greater groups of people: cost (BBC News, 2021c).

Recently, we’ve experimented with asking readers for their own stories of climate action (Briggs, 2022; Fig. 2). We took inspiration from prototypes like Climate Map (CHEP, 2022), which encourages people to submit images of them taking action on climate change. The response has been encouraging.

Fig. 2
A screenshot titled get in touch has text that reads, "Have you changed your diet because of climate change? how else are you preparing for rising global temperature? share your experience by emailing have your say at the rate of BBC dot co dot u k."

We’ve recently been asking readers for examples of climate action, as seen in Briggs (2022)

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Tell Hyperlocal Stories Using Natural Language Templates

One barrier to better climate change reporting is that such a global problem can feel inaccessible or even irrelevant to readers, who want to know how the problem affects them where they live. By using Natural Language Generation technology (Leppänen et al., 2017) and natural language templates in particular, we have the opportunity to tell more locally specific stories of climate change, which we can pair with stories of climate action.

Let’s take tree planting as an example. Imagine you wanted to write one news story about tree planting for every district in the UK. You start all revved up for the first story but begin to lose the will to live by the fifth story. It becomes clear that having an established template would make these stories much easier to produce and understand. In my team at BBC News Labs, we worked with journalists to write a template to tell such a story about government-funded tree planting. We took tree planting data, i.e., the number of trees planted and where, and slotted it into the template.

For example, the template for the headline might read:

[Number of trees] government-funded trees planted in [Name of place] in 8 years.

You then slot the data from the dataset into the template, giving a headline like “91,000 government-funded trees planted in Aylesbury Vale in eight years” (BBC News, 2019; Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
A screenshot of a news posted on August 2019 18 hours 29 minutes reads, "91,100 government-funded trees planted in Aylesbury Vale in eight years."

Sample new story generated from a natural language template, as seen in BBC News (2019)

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You can use this slot-filling approach to generate text for a huge number of articles, turning data into text. You could do the same for stories about rainfall, or air pollution, or hundreds of stories related to climate change. With a good template and data from a reliable source, you can tell thousands of articles, all personalized to people depending on where they live (Molumby, 2019).

To each of these hyperlocal stories, you can pair case studies. For example, if the story is about harmful air pollution in East London, you might pair it with a case study of people cycling instead of driving to work or making face masks. These examples of action don’t necessarily have to be from East London, either. A bike scheme in Kigali, Rwanda (BBC News 2021d), could be just as inspiring, because it features people going through the same struggles, even if they are thousands of miles away.

The division of labor here is important; journalists can dedicate their time to finding and curating appropriate case studies while the template turns the data into comprehensible content. To return to our tree planting article in Aylesbury Vale, if the journalist already has a draft article, she could spend time finding a volunteer organization to plant those trees for inclusion in the story. By pairing the facts of the story, derived from data, to the human impact and human response, you can tell stories of action, at scale, to people about where they are.

Conclusion

There is an enormous number of stories we can share about climate change action. Each can add humanity and color to scientific reports, climate predictions, and other more traditional climate change stories. There are practical limitations, however; such storytelling is time-consuming, so if we want to make this the norm, introducing these stories into our reporting systematically, we need to find faster ways to collect and curate them.

Good progress has been made already. Platforms such as Hearken and prototypes like Climate Map show that readers are engaged in these topics, offering their own examples and reducing the time needed in the process. We know too that combining reader-submitted examples with template-generated news reports can deliver much more relevant, engaging, and inspiring climate news.

We don’t have all the answers though. We may have more examples of climate action, but more work needs to be done to decide how best to present these stories. Should they be told with different tones or different media types for different readers? Only further experimentation will teach us. We should embrace this, continue getting readers’ feedback, and share lessons learned across newsrooms.