The power of female voices: what climate change communications can learn from coronavirus
When the world experiences a crisis which is global, has the ability to cause suffering to anyone and whose solution requires a significant behaviour change it is inevitable that comparisons will be drawn to climate change.
People seeking to make sense of the coronavirus crisis will ask what lessons can be learned which might help us reduce the impacts of climate change; a far bigger crisis. We want simple narratives; we want reasons why. In trying to find a silver lining to the suffering of the last few months it is natural to think about the ultimate environmental, humanitarian and economic crisis, the one which for many of us has been looming on the horizon our whole lives.
It’s true, there are functions of the world we have built which enable both the pandemic and climate change: destruction of the natural world; our encroachment on wild spaces; an insatiable appetite for travel; under-funding of public services; valuing certain lives over others; a relentless pursuit of economic growth at all costs.
But the reality is that the solutions to the coronavirus crisis and climate change have very little in common. There is no vaccine for climate change that can be made in 12 months and which will allow us all to go back to living our lives as normal. It won’t be solved by staying at home for a few months.
It is profoundly optimistic, at best, to think that when freedom of movement resumes, when restaurants, bars and airlines open again, we will all choose to stay at home and sit quietly. The pandemic asked us all, as much as possible, to put our normal lives on hold and the majority of people did; for a few weeks.
The climate crisis demands us to fundamentally change our lifestyles, forever.
The pandemic has shown that yes, behaviour change can happen rapidly, that governments can throw money at problems to fix them, and that we can all unite behind a common cause — but it has come at huge social and economic cost, and already, only seven weeks into a lockdown, we are desperate to know when it will end.
We may see behaviour change stick, for some people, beyond the end of the lockdown, whether that’s due to fears about the virus or economic necessity. In either case these aren’t trends we should be hoping to see last. There is nothing to be celebrated about emissions falling because of the current scenario.
So, there is little that can be applied from how we changed to dampen the coronavirus crisis and how we need to change for the climate crisis. But perhaps there is a lesson in what the pandemic has shown us about what happens when women are in charge.
A few months into the pandemic and there are drastically different scenarios playing out in different countries. The countries which have had the most successful responses to the virus (New Zealand, Germany, Finland, Norway, Iceland, for example) are led by women. The way they have talked to their countries about the pandemic has been empathetic, decisive, adult, honest and caring. Less talk of ‘fighting’ an ‘invisible killer’ and more talk of (in New Zealand’s case) a ‘social bubble’ or (in Germany) clear, scientific, straightforward.
Communication around climate change has historically been dominated by harsh, masculine rhetoric: we are in a war with global warming — it is an apocalyptic threat which we must combat. This language has yet to prove effective. In this crisis, female voices have consistently been strong and decisive as well as calm and caring, and they are working. We have seen remarkable demonstrations of true leadership and effective communication from women; the climate crisis would benefit hugely by learning from this.
Climate change is plagued, inevitably, by hyperbole; after all, warming is global, growth of emissions is exponential, ice shelves larger than entire countries are melting. These are concepts it is very hard to get our heads around. Coronavirus is also operating on a planetary scale, but in order to stop its spread we have to act on a local and personal scale. Where we have had clear and calm communications about what we should do, it has worked; where we have had fumbled, confused messages (see: the U.K. right now) it has not.
Women, and their words, have been sidelined for centuries. If we can learn anything from the coronavirus crisis which will help us with the climate crisis it is this: there is power in female voices and they must be heard.
