11 Why is public interest communication important to climate change?

Public interest communication can be used for any issue.

In this guide, we tend to use climate change for many of our examples. Communication efforts can help shift individual behaviours to better support climate outcomes, for instance when it comes to recycling, transport use, and diet. However, individual climate-supporting behaviours aren’t enough to meet global climate targets. For that, legal, economic and institutional change is required.

To support legal, economic and institutional reform, public interest communication can help increase demand among public audiences that their governments and institutions must do more. In this way, public interest communication can be used as a political advocacy tool, to influence decision-makers to make the legal, economic and institutional reforms necessary to support rapid, just and robust climate action.

Public interest communication is often ‘outward focused’, running campaigns to influence policy or wider social norms. However, public interest communication can also be more ‘inward focused’, seeking to drive change within an organisation. Sometimes the two may overlap, for example when a very large and diffuse organisation might resemble ‘the public’, and when similar communication efforts are required to create lasting change. We can look at models of social and organisational change to understand more about how public interest communication can support the legislative and financial systems change required to save the planet.