Document details

Effective Climate Communication: Turning Eco-Anxiety into Eco-Action

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2025), xiii, 203 pp.

Contains index

ISBN 978-3-031-67340-5 (pdf); 978-3-031-67339-9 (print)

"This book explores the urgent challenges of communicating climate change in the media. While many books have been written about climate change, this book goes to the very heart of what makes humans care about stories enough to act. In a direct and sympathetic approach, Denisova tackles problems of greenwashing, news narratives, colonial framings and more. Taking climate anxiety as a starting point, the author positions herself with empathy and asks the question: ‘what slows down citizen action?’ This fresh perspective acknowledges the pressing challenge of public disengagement and the anxiety people feel when faced with increasingly bleak headlines as the climate crisis intensifies. There is a surprising challenge to apocalyptic storytelling and a hero’s narrative, which Denisova argues are counter-productive, while solutions are provided for media storytellers." (Publisher description)
1 Introduction, 1
2 Ten News Values for Climate Communication: From ‘Crisisation’ to Attribution, Emotional Offsets, Pragmatic Instructions and Punchy Storytelling, 13
3 Global South and Global North: Discrepancies in Climate Coverage, 61
4 The Many Faces of Greenwashing, 83
5 The ‘Ignorance as a Choice’ Paradox, and the Role of Depleted Resources in the Responses to Climate Messages, 97
6 From Emotions to Determination: The Communication Tools for Free Riders and ‘Conditional Cooperators’, 113
7 Climate Optimism or Climate Pessimism? Self-Efficacy Boosters and Storytelling for Change, 157
8 Conclusion, 197