Sammendrag
What can motivate people to change (or not change) their lifestyle in order to contribute to reducing the serious effects of climate change? This is the overarching topic we will address in our presentation. While there is broad agreement on the urgency of the climate situation, people must also go on living their daily lives, attending to their own needs and interests, as well as those of their familiy and community.
The climate change debate focuses on a wide range of topics, which is not surprising given the complexity of the issue. Since the beginning of the 2000s, we have also observed a particular interest in climate communication in general and language use in particular. Such discussions of climate language use in public debates, on social media, but also in national representative studies has been undertaken by the CLIMLIFE project, which we have led (Fløttum)/participated in (Dahl) (https://www.uib.no/en/rg/lingclim/139228/climlife).
The public debate has focused much on the words ‘shame’ and ‘blame’. From our recent studies among young people and seniors, we have found that the majority in both groups express a clearly negative opinion on the use of such words. But what kind of words do people think would motivate climate action, and what arguments do they find most convincing?
In our presentation we will answer these questions, based on a lexical-semantic analysis of the results of a national survey fielded in Norway in February 2023 through the Norwegian Citizen Panel. In this survey we used an open-ended question where respondents could answer freely in their own words. The question was formulated in this hypothetical way: Imagine that you were given the task of motivating people to live in a climate-friendly way. Which words or arguments would you use?
We think the results will be relevant to anyone interested in climate change communication and of particular importance to the profession of climate communicators.
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