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16 The 7 Climate Visuals principles 1. Show ‘real people’ not staged photo-ops 2. Tell new stories 3. Show climate causes at scale 4. Climate impacts are emotionally powerful 5. Show local (but serious) climate impacts 6. Be very careful with protest imagery 7. Understand your audience On the Climate Visuals site each picture, alongside the usual caption and credit, includes a brief explanation as to which principle it fulfils and the research findings that supports its use. Principle: Tell new stories Underwater Signing This image is justifiably famous among climate campaigners – it playfully but forcefully illustrates the seriousness of rising sea levels, while pointing towards a constructive (political) solution. For once, this is a politician in a ‘posed’ photograph that is likely to resonate with viewers. What it shows: Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture Dr Ibrahim Didi signs the decree of an underwater cabinet meeting. Photo by Mohamed Seeneen Principle: Show local (but serious) climate impacts Floods in South Yorkshire Our research found that showing ‘local’ impacts can be powerful, so long as they are not trivial. In our survey, ‘local’ flood images (i.e. when they depicted the country where participants were from) tended to be powerful, and engaging across the political spectrum. What it shows: Crane Moor Road Flood. Torrential rainfall in South Yorkshire on the 25th June 2007 led to the beck flooding in the afternoon. Photo by Wendy North change poses more generally which is that even now we can see it all around us, it still has this abstract quality to it. It’s everything and nothing all at the same time. You could argue that because climate change could be represented in an infinite number of ways that perhaps we’ve become collectively paralysed in sticking with the same visual clichés, because we know that, on one level, they work. If you stick a polar bear on an icecap on a story, it very quickly says ‘This story is about climate change’. On that superficial level it’s an effective strategy to communicate about the issue. But what kind of story does it tell? Is it a story about distant things that happened in remote places and to animals that you’ll never see, which, as much as you might feel a tug on the heartstrings, is not going to impact on your life? Or is it a story deeply intwined with how we consume, how we travel? PL: The images are strangely depopulated... AC: Yeah, it’s odd that when you go looking for images that portray climate change there’s no people in the story. As a basic starting point, foregrounding the human dimension of climate change more strongly in our imagery is essential. As an organisation we have worked for about fifteen years on climate change communication and most of the work has been on language and how to frame messages. How do we tell stories? How do we construct narratives that engage with people? It was a long time into Climate Outreach’s work before anyone really started asking in a serious way, ‘Doesn’t it also matter what visual story we are telling people?’ We generally reached for the same old things that everyone else did. Our work has always been about using the psychology, using the social science... PL: Tell me a little about the research that you’ve done and how you carried that out. AC: We carried out research in three countries – the UK, Germany and the US – where we showed people a wide range of different images, and we clustered them together so that people saw themed collections of images based on characteristics that we thought would be important to how they interpreted them. So some were geographically near to the people taking part, some were distant, some had people some didn’t have people, some were climate impact some were solutions focused. We then ran a survey in three countries with a thousand people in each country, so a nationally representative survey, with a smaller set of images and got some numerical responses: did it make them want to change their behaviour in any way? There really hadn’t been very much research before that had looked to provide practical guidance at the end of it. That’s what we do as an organisation. We analysed the research and we came up with a set of seven principles but also translated those findings into a climate change image based library. This was definitely a new thing: a set of images that represent – based on our research – the most effective way to go about climate
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Climate Visuals Interview 17 Principle: Show ‘real people’, not staged photo-ops Working on Wind Turbine This photo of ‘experts at work’ shows an unusual perspective on wind turbines, and is likely to be seen as credible and authentic. What it shows: two maintenance men work on a wind turbine in northern Poland near Kobylnica during the winter. Photo by Robert van Waarden / Cavan change visualisation. The idea of a research based image library, now with nearly nine hundred images, that’s based on communications guidance, is something that has piqued people’s interest in a good way, we have had a lot of positive reaction to it. PL: Do you want to outline those key guidelines and give us a sense of what they are and why you felt that they were the ways that representation should move? AC: The seven principles that we came up with fell out of the research that we specifically did on imagery, but they also follow from a much longer process of research that’s happened around language and around communication on climate change more generally. Some of them are basic but are important I think, so: show people in images but don’t just show any old people, show real people doing actual stuff. Rather than people standing around and pointing at wind turbines and looking happy about it, show people benefiting from them or interacting with them. And if you are going to show people in emotionally charged climate impact situations, which are real, then show authentic, not contrived, not exaggerated, versions of those situations. And they’ve got to be emotionally sensitive as well, this situation has been happening for a much longer period of time around development and aid photography. It’s arguably not been happening much around climate change but the same ideas apply. PL: Does political outlook make any difference to the way the pictures are seen? AC: Yeah, we found most of the images were received better by people on the left. People on the left generally cared more about climate change but there were a handful of images that we tested – things like a guy in his loft doing roof insulation, people getting on with practical responses to climate change – were actually preferred by people on the right than people on the left. So there’s

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The 7 Climate Visuals principles 1. Show ‘real people’ not staged photo-ops 2. Tell new stories 3. Show climate causes at scale 4. Climate impacts are emotionally powerful 5. Show local (but serious) climate impacts 6. Be very careful with protest imagery 7. Understand your audience

On the Climate Visuals site each picture, alongside the usual caption and credit, includes a brief explanation as to which principle it fulfils and the research findings that supports its use.

Principle: Tell new stories

Underwater Signing This image is justifiably famous among climate campaigners – it playfully but forcefully illustrates the seriousness of rising sea levels, while pointing towards a constructive (political) solution. For once, this is a politician in a ‘posed’ photograph that is likely to resonate with viewers.

What it shows: Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture Dr Ibrahim Didi signs the decree of an underwater cabinet meeting. Photo by Mohamed Seeneen

Principle: Show local (but serious) climate impacts

Floods in South Yorkshire Our research found that showing ‘local’ impacts can be powerful, so long as they are not trivial. In our survey, ‘local’ flood images (i.e. when they depicted the country where participants were from) tended to be powerful, and engaging across the political spectrum.

What it shows: Crane Moor Road Flood. Torrential rainfall in South Yorkshire on the 25th June 2007 led to the beck flooding in the afternoon. Photo by Wendy North change poses more generally which is that even now we can see it all around us, it still has this abstract quality to it. It’s everything and nothing all at the same time. You could argue that because climate change could be represented in an infinite number of ways that perhaps we’ve become collectively paralysed in sticking with the same visual clichés, because we know that, on one level, they work. If you stick a polar bear on an icecap on a story, it very quickly says ‘This story is about climate change’. On that superficial level it’s an effective strategy to communicate about the issue. But what kind of story does it tell? Is it a story about distant things that happened in remote places and to animals that you’ll never see, which, as much as you might feel a tug on the heartstrings, is not going to impact on your life? Or is it a story deeply intwined with how we consume, how we travel?

PL: The images are strangely depopulated... AC: Yeah, it’s odd that when you go looking for images that portray climate change there’s no people in the story. As a basic starting point, foregrounding the human dimension of climate change more strongly in our imagery is essential. As an organisation we have worked for about fifteen years on climate change communication and most of the work has been on language and how to frame messages. How do we tell stories? How do we construct narratives that engage with people? It was a long time into Climate Outreach’s work before anyone really started asking in a serious way, ‘Doesn’t it also matter what visual story we are telling people?’ We generally reached for the same old things that everyone else did. Our work has always been about using the psychology, using the social science...

PL: Tell me a little about the research that you’ve done and how you carried that out. AC: We carried out research in three countries – the UK, Germany and the US – where we showed people a wide range of different images, and we clustered them together so that people saw themed collections of images based on characteristics that we thought would be important to how they interpreted them. So some were geographically near to the people taking part, some were distant, some had people some didn’t have people, some were climate impact some were solutions focused. We then ran a survey in three countries with a thousand people in each country, so a nationally representative survey, with a smaller set of images and got some numerical responses: did it make them want to change their behaviour in any way? There really hadn’t been very much research before that had looked to provide practical guidance at the end of it. That’s what we do as an organisation. We analysed the research and we came up with a set of seven principles but also translated those findings into a climate change image based library. This was definitely a new thing: a set of images that represent – based on our research – the most effective way to go about climate

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