The Deep End of the Pool: Strategy, Skills and Priorities for Climate Communication

Abstract:

In the complex public landscape of climate science, scientists are tasked with the roles of communicator, entrepreneur, media strategist, and moral compass. These novel identities may or may not be welcome by individual scientists, however they clearly push the broader scientific community out of an established cultural role and into new and novel paradigms. For the individual scientist, an effective way to mitigate the risks and maximize the benefits of speaking about climate science in public arenas is to front-load the work of communication strategizing. Scientists can build their own roadmaps for how they will talk about both their own narrow field of study and the broad field of climate change. The workload generated by this includes prioritizing science communication training events, especially in the early career timeframe, building a suite of social media and entrepreneurial skills, and delineating personal boundaries of advocacy, objectivity, and morality. The use of such a framework for planning cycles of publication and media engagement may support risk adverse scientists to come forward in public settings.