Show Summary Details

Page of

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Climate Science. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 22 April 2025

Communication Strategies of Environmental NGOs and Advocacy Groupslocked

Communication Strategies of Environmental NGOs and Advocacy Groupslocked

  • Steven YearleySteven YearleyUniversity of Edinburgh

Summary

Environmental organizations have been critically important in publicizing and supplying arguments about climate change, just as with the other environmental issues facing contemporary societies. In their campaigns and activism, environmental groups need to be able to make influential and widely circulated claims about the state of the natural world or the ecological impact of human activities. To do this, they have to “manage” their relationship to science. Environmentalists (in contrast to many other campaigners) are obliged to be science communicators because the convincingness of their message depends on the underlying presumption that their claims have a basis in factual, scientific accuracy.

Facing the science and communication challenges of climate change, environmentalists have often found their role to be an unusual one. Unlike in most other ecological campaign areas, they have been committed to defending or bolstering mainstream scientific opinion about the nature and causes of climate change. Nonetheless, they have sought ways of distancing themselves from some of the policy and technological options apparently favored by leading scientific figures. And they have pioneered approaches based more on long-term investment strategies and normative values which, to some degree, allow them to sidestep difficulties associated with the adoption of a subordinate role in the science communication arena.

Subjects

  • Policy, Politics, and Governance
  • Communication

You do not currently have access to this article

Login

Please login to access the full content.

Subscribe

Access to the full content requires a subscription