Queensland Climate Movement

This workshop was part of the movement building discussions, and addressed issues of outreach, communication and engagement in building the capacity and strengths of the Queensland Climate Movement. Specifically, it addressed questions of:

• How can we engage more people in our communities on climate change issues?
• What words or phrases are current in climate matters?
• What alternative messages could be effective?

How to get more people involved in working on climate change?

Multiple targets of climate change outreach and engagement:

• Influence the receptive
• Politicise the passionate
• Empower the committed
  

Making Use of Events

Events like Walk Against Warming provide a basis for large scale community participation in a low-key action on climate change. How can we make it more effective? Memorable? Eye-catching? Media-savvy? Moving beyond placards, t-shirts…

Making climate action a status symbol and developing role-models? How can we use marketing techniques to position climate action as sexy/fun?

We need to ensure that our events create opportunities for meaningful engagement and active participation. How can we create concrete involvement that equals rewarding participation?

How can we maximise media coverage of our events to build awareness/branding? A good local example was Greenfest, which was very well advertised, covered extensively in all local papers, and had the support of Quest News.

Another example is provided by the water revolution - media got behind it also. Can we build on the momentum of the water shortage and the success of getting on top of it? This campaign also relied upon personal self-interest, and promoted the message that we are all at risk, and all in this together.

Building Community

Difficult to do, but highly rewarding in terms of the outcomes. ‘If you want to go faster, go alone. If you want to go further, go together.’ The objective is the long term development of the movement –> keeping people empowered. Some suggestions:

• ‘Power of Community’ screenings
• ‘Plan it for the Planet’ community building slogan
• Getting support and building relationships around similar interests (farmers and environmentalists against coal)

Targeted letter-writing campaigns

We should recognise the power of the pen - there could be some very useful resources to be promoted including templates, skills and providing an organised structure to the process.

Could be extended to information campaigns - but we need to ensure high quality and consistent information, economic arguments, stats, $$ impacts. We can also make use of the opportunities provided by the impacts of climate change - for example, as food prices are rising, we can hand out brochures/letters at supermarkets.

Getting our messages right

There is no one silver bullet when it comes to messages and messaging about climate change - some people emphasise the emergency element, others stress the positive positioning over the negative. A number of ideas were floated, including:

• Ensuring that we use positive and empowering language - use terms like demonstration over protest
• Emphasing the opportunities that might be available, and using that to appeal to people’s rational self-interest - ‘green money making opportunities’
• Getting beyond terms like global warming (too cuddly?) and climate change (redundant) - moving to crisis and emergency language
• Stress the influence on the broad community, the common interest, all involved, all affected
• About our kids futures (long time frame)
• Affirm the value of lower consumption (of fuel, resources) - consume less, live more
• 70% of Australians are concerned about climate change, but may need to find meaningful ways to express this
• We need to be prepared with responses for people as they hurt.
• Identify and provide ways to create moments of organised collective action to support leaders and activists - reclaim democracy in the process of achieving collective objectives.