Living Data

Recommendations

RECOMMENDATIONS

Provide understandable, scientific, credible information.

Use novel, vivid and concrete imagery and goals to attract attention, and to provide clarity of information and purpose.

Employ experiential learning (learning by personal experience), not just descriptive or scientific information, in order to engage people personally through active social involvement. Such involvement may become a prime motivator all on its own, as in 350.org's campaign to October 2009 and 2010 where people in places all over the world enthusiastically got together to endorse and display the number '350', the level (in parts per million) at which some say C02 concentrations need to be stabilized.

Connect with emotions (carefully): affective responses that are personally relevant, inspiring and motivating are the most influential and long-lasting. Real engagement requires "a personal state of connection with the issue of climate change...it is not enough for people to know about climate change in order to be engaged; they also need to care about it, be motivated and able to take action.

Balance negative and positive information: Messages which emphasise environmental losses and alert people to the risks of inaction are consistently more persuasive than those which only emphasise benefits of action; however, such threats should be combined with positive implications of action to avoid a sense of helplessness or numbing.

Summary of social research findings by Stephen R. J. Sheppard:
Visualising Climate Change:
A Guide to Visual Communication of Climate Change
and Developing Local Solutions
(Routledge, 2012, p.36)