Public engagement: The missing link to a net zero world?
Net Zero Festival: Author Kim Stanley Robinson and experts from BritainThinks, Hubbub and Lancaster University debate the challenge and opportunity of securing public support for climate action
“Call it a fuel crisis and everyone responds with queues at petrol stations, call it a climate crisis and it just doesn’t land in the same way.”
So went a comment from an audience member watching the Net Zero Festival yesterday, which served to exemplify a common feeling among those working to avert climate breakdown. Indeed, finding a way to make individuals, politicians and businesses react treat the climate emergency as precisely that – an emergency – is one of the greatest challenges in accelerating the path to a net zero future. And it was precisely this topic which several experts sought to navigate throughout yesterday’s various discussions and speeches.
“[The climate crisis] feels like an existential crisis,” said Viki Cooke, co-founder and joint chair of BritainThinks. “It feels so big and so remote from what individuals can do. We need to have clear fixes so that people can feel like they’re playing their part. Otherwise, it becomes quite alienating.”
With ever greater numbers of governments and business announcing net zero targets, how to communicate these issues to the general public is quickly rising up the list of priorities for policymakers and campaigners. Both governments and businesses require consent, and pressure, from the public to make the essential transformational differences to both the economy as well as individuals’ daily lives.
The broad view from discussions at the event – which also featured Hubbub’s Heather Poore and Professor Rebecca Willis – was, therefore, that meaningful change would be impossible without public backing.
“Individuals, businesses and governments – if any one of these steps back and doesn’t play its part it will very quickly apparent,” said Poore, creative director and co-founder of environmental charity Hubbub.
Fortunately, there is growing evidence that the UK population is starting to become fully engaged in the need for climate action, even if terms such as ‘Net Zero’ and ‘ESG’ remain alien to most.
Professor Willis, from Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University, emphasised that the climate crisis was a source of concern for 61 per cent of the public, according to recent polling, but she warned that it had also become an area of cynicism for many.
“The public tend to blame the government [for inaction] and the government blame the public,” she said.
Willis, who played a leading role in last year’s Climate Assembly UK – the pioneering exercise led by Parliament which saw over 100 members of the public deliberate over policy options for delivering net zero – said the debate over how to combat climate change needed to be made fully accessible.
“What the Climate Assembly showed to me is that if you give people the time, space and, frankly, the respect and responsibility, they come up with really sensible answers to difficult and complex questions,” she said.
Noting the success of the Climate Assembly, Cooke said wide engagement was vital as, for many groups in society, the environment remains existential while other issues, such as inequality, have a more obvious everyday impact on their lives.
“People are worried about healthcare, jobs, money and we have a ridiculous proportion of people living in poverty. For them this is an abstract issue because they’re worried about putting food on the table for their children,” she said.
Cooke said that the assumption in these groups is that that taking any personal action on climate change is going to bring significant costs, such as switching to an electric vehicle. Policymakers must, instead, focus on the benefits that tackling climate change can bring, whether it be new skilled jobs or the delivery of the government’s levelling up agenda, she argued.
But while better communication can improve how the government inspires action and engagement from the public, the responsibility of business was also underlined.
“Businesses have got a huge roll to play for a few reasons,” said Heather Poore at Hubbub. “They’ve obviously got access to their customer bases and to the public across all sections of society.”
“People want to see leadership from business and government and I think that this empowers people to think, ‘they’re doing their part, what can I do?’,” she added. “People really appreciate it when businesses invest and have a go at something and are really honest about the impact that they’re having or the challenges that they face.”
The discussion followed a keynote speech earlier in the day from celebrated sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, someone who surely knows a thing or two about engaging with the public on big, existential topics, if the huge sales of his books are anything to go by.
The author described the Paris Agreement as a “major moment in world history”, but argued that too many national leaders saw tackling climate change as a zero-sum game in which one nation can only benefit at the expense of another.
However, looking at the global political system more generally, Robinson said that the use of quantitative easing (QE) since the credit crunch in 2008 pointed to an opportunity for governments to pay for a speeded up transition to low carbon technology. While QE had paid for “banks to do the same old foolish things,” a carbon QE would pay for the roll out of clean energy and other green technology at a pace that was needed, Robinson said.
Business as usual for the global economy on the other hand would leave the world “doomed to a mass extinction event,” he warned, potentially playing out a dystopian future not a million miles away from a novel he might write.
Both Robinson’s keynote speech – and the discussion over public engagement involving Cooke, Willis and Poore – emphasised the opportunities for social justice, improved living standards and skilled employment that an accelerated path to net zero can bring. The challenge now is to ensure policymakers, businesses and environmental experts bring the public along with them every step of the way.
