Enabling community leaders to communicate about climate change
The EMS Outreach and Communication Award 2024 is presented to the project Enabling community leaders to communicate about climate change, a joint initiative of the Royal Meteorological Society and the British Antarctic Survey.
Citation:
The project is honoured for an innovative engagement approach to build an understanding of climate change within local communities, empowering people to engage with messages from politicians and the media to make informed decisions, thus enhancing the impact of science
The Royal Meteorological Society and British Antarctic Survey project is well-designed and focussed. It concentrates on outreach to the general public and cleverly uses existing community leaders as key intermediaries to bring climate change information down to the community/individual level. This is a very innovative and strong approach, supported by high level scientific expertise. The evaluation process strongly supports timely communication on climate change, which is urgently needed. The project outputs consist of an excellent summary and a forward-looking and practical conclusion with constructive suggestions. The project team members are Hannah Mallinson (Royal Meteorological Society), Ellie Highwood (Royal Meteorological Society) and Ella Gilbert (British Antarctic Survey).
About the project
In 2022, the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), in partnership with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), secured funding from the Natural Environment Research Council’s (part of UKRI) Growing Roots public engagement funding opportunity to deliver climate change communication training to community leaders in every region of the UK. The aim of the project was to build understanding of climate change within local communities, enabling people to engage with messages from politicians and the media and make informed decisions. The project team set out to pilot a new approach to engagement (train the trainer), using virtual workshops to give up to 140 community leaders the tools and confidence to talk to their audiences about climate change, and to extend the impact of the work by enabling them to spread messages more widely.
The project ran from August 2022 to February 2023, with an analysis of the project’s impact in autumn 2023. In August 2022, two virtual focus groups were held with 16 community leaders to better understand the needs of the audience and help shape the training. The findings from these focus groups were used to adapt and build on existing training materials held by RMetS. The project team then delivered six 90-minute virtual training sessions to 116 community leaders between October 2022 and January 2023. Each training session was jointly delivered by RMetS and BAS and covered the science of climate change, including how changes in the polar regions affect the wider world, the implications for the UK now and in the future, what governments and individuals are doing to tackle the problem, and ideas on how best to communicate and engage with their communities. All participants received a copy of the training slides and the RMetS digital resource ‘Climate Change FAQs’.
Surveys were sent to participants 1 month and 6 months after the training to assess their subsequent engagement with their community on climate change and the wider impact of the project. The 1-month survey asked about the session itself and how they had already used or planned to use the session. The 6-month survey looked at the ‘stickiness’ of learning, but focused more on behaviour change and the impact of the sessions on participants and their organisations and activities.
A detailed overview of the project findings can be found in
