Building bridges through values-based climate communication

In the era of escalating planetary crises, the way we discuss climate change is just as important as the actions we take. As someone working at the intersection of advocacy, youth engagement, and climate justice, I often find myself in rooms filled with complex terminology like “NDCs,” “loss and damage,” “just transition,” and “resilience mechanisms.” While these terms resonate within policy circles, they often leave grassroots communities, youth, and local journalists behind. Climate science isn’t the problem; communicating it is. Despite the growing urgency, climate communication still struggles with jargon-heavy language, top-down narratives, and a lack of contextual sensitivity. Whether it's climate justice, adaptation policies, or carbon markets, messages often fail to reach the communities most affected. Too often, climate messages are designed for donors, diplomats, or data scientists, not for farmers, fishers, or frontline youth. This disconnect limits understanding and hinders action. That’s why I co-founded the Climate Communicators Community in Bangladesh with my friend Nayoka Martinez-Bäckström . Our goal? To bridge the gap between science, policy, and people by equipping a new generation of climate storytellers who can decode complexity, translate urgency, and amplify community voices. From climate journalism to strategic communications, from social media to policy briefs, Bangladesh needs a diverse, inclusive, and locally rooted communication ecosystem that can amplify the unheard voices from the frontline, influence policymakers, and share the Bangladeshi climate justice narrative on the global stage. We also need to embrace diverse platforms whether it’s TikTok, community radio, or local storytelling forums, to reach different audiences where they are. We’re building a space where young communicators, researchers, journalists, and activists can collaborate, experiment, and learn from each other. Because communication isn’t just a tool, it’s a frontline of climate justice. Here’s what we need instead: 🔹 Localisation of climate narratives, not just translating English to Bangla or another language/ dialects, but embedding messages in cultural, emotional, and community contexts. 🔹 Storytelling over statistics—people remember stories, not numbers. The tale of a family displaced by river erosion can convey climate impacts more powerfully than a temperature graph. 🔹 Dialogue over monologue—communication shouldn’t be top-down. Engaging communities in co-creating solutions can bridge trust and inspire action. 🔹 Reclaiming platforms—youth, frontline communities, Indigenous people, and climate-vulnerable groups must not only be “consulted” but empowered to communicate their own truths in their own words. I’m committed to reimagining climate communication from Gaibandha to Geneva to ensure the people most affected by the crisis are not just spoken about, but spoken with. #ClimateCommunication

In Türkiye, climate change is often approached with the assumption that “if scientists explain it, society will be convinced.” Yet we are increasingly seeing that this is not how it works in practice. The issue is often not the accuracy of the information, but who delivers it and how. People tend to accept or reject climate messages not based on technical content alone, but on how well those messages align with their values, lived experiences, and relationships of trust. This is critically important for Türkiye. Many technically sound proposals on climate policy—whether on energy transition, agricultural adaptation, or water management—struggle to gain social acceptance. Too often, these ideas are communicated in abstract, top-down, and distant language. Technical statements from Ankara, academic reports, or global scenarios frequently fail to connect with the realities of everyday life at the local level. This disconnect fuels the perception that climate action is something “imposed from outside.” Another key point is trust. In Türkiye, people often place greater confidence in those who feel familiar and relatable than in formal institutions or distant authorities. A farmer listens to another farmer, an industrialist to someone from their sector, and at the neighborhood level, trusted local figures tend to be far more persuasive. This does not diminish the value of science; it highlights the need for science to reach society through the right channels and in the right language. This also helps explain why misinformation spreads so easily. Misinformation often works not through technical arguments, but through emotional and identity-based cues. When a message feels like it comes from “one of us,” its factual accuracy becomes secondary. That is why simply correcting false information is rarely enough; rebuilding trust is essential. For Türkiye, effective climate policy does not primarily require more data or louder warnings. What is truly needed is a communication approach that builds relationships, listens, and takes local experience seriously. Climate change is as much a social issue as it is a technical one—and unless this reality is acknowledged, even the most scientifically sound policies will fall short.

How do we make climate communication resonate with the very people it affects the most? 💡 🌎 In my latest essay for Question of Cities, I reflect on this pressing question, drawing on my experience in journalism and storytelling, as well as research and fieldwork in the climate space over the last few years. The article outlines how dominant climate narratives often remain inaccessible, overly technical, and disconnected from everyday lived realities. Some key takeaways: 🔁 1. Translation isn’t enough—localisation matters. Efforts like the UNDP Climate Dictionary are welcome, but we need to go further. People don’t say “Jalvayu Parivartan”—they talk about rain delays, changing festivals, and crop failures. Climate terms must emerge from how people experience change, not how we define it. Climate must be framed as an everyday issue. For most people in India, climate change competes with daily concerns like food, housing, and livelihoods. 📚 2. Storytelling enables agency. We need to shift from policy briefs to bottom-up storytelling, where a fisherwoman in the Sundarbans or a tribal woman in Odisha becomes the knowledge holder. 🎭 3. Embrace diverse media and people’s science. From metaphor-rich language to theatre, dance, and music—creative formats hold emotional and cultural power. Even community-defined terms like “wet drought” offer nuance and should shape climate adaptation strategies. 📰4. Mainstream media must build capacity. At a recent workshop in Maharashtra, we saw how rural reporters struggle to differentiate between climate and weather. There’s little support for them—especially women—to cover these stories. Climate needs to be integrated into all beats, not confined to disaster or weather coverage. 🎯 5. Climate communications is not just outreach—it’s strategy. Too often, communication is underfunded and under-prioritised. But to build inclusive, impact-driven programmes, we must invest in grassroots media literacy, storyteller training, and long-term behavioural change campaigns. 🌏 In the coming years, we will witness a growing wave of efforts to communicate climate change in new and compelling ways as climate becomes centre stage in policy and mainstream narratives. But the real test of these approaches won’t lie in international recognition or polished campaigns. It will lie in how meaningfully they resonate on the ground—in how a coal worker in Jharkhand or a landless labourer in Maharashtra understands, imagines, and navigates a world that is 1.5 degrees C warmer. 🔗 Read the piece here: https://lnkd.in/dGG8ZNZn A big thanks to Smruti Koppikar and Shobha Surin for trusting me with this piece. And of course, this would not be possible without Asar and all the fabulous work that I have got to be a part of in the last 3+ years! #ClimateCommunication #ClimateJustice

Sustainability leadership is no longer about what a company says in its reports. It is about how clearly it helps people see the future it is building—and what must change today to get there. If you are a CEO, founder, or public leader, your greatest climate asset is not your next pledge. It is your ability to translate complexity into meaning: connecting science to everyday decisions, policy to people’s lived realities, and long‑term risk to choices being made this quarter. Effective sustainability communication does three things at once: it makes the problem tangible, the pathway credible, and the roles of different actors unmistakably clear. Most organisations still communicate climate in fragments—one campaign on net zero, another on water, another on social impact. The result is noise, not narrative. The leaders who stand out build a single, coherent story that links decarbonisation, resilience, just transition, and innovation into a shared mission for employees, investors, regulators, and communities. In that story, emissions targets are not the headline; they are the proof points. True climate communication is also an exercise in power-sharing. It means moving from glossy declarations to radical transparency, inviting scrutiny, surfacing trade‑offs, and giving stakeholders the tools to hold you accountable. It means listening as much as broadcasting—treating every town hall, community dialogue, or podcast mic as a space where strategy can be stress-tested, improved, and co‑created. In an age of polycrisis, the most valuable leaders will be those who can turn sustainability from a specialist conversation into a societal one—making it understandable, actionable, and emotionally resonant for people far beyond the sustainability team. That is not a communications afterthought; it is core climate strategy.