Why Climate Communication Keeps Failing: And What It Would Take to Actually Break Through
About the session
The evidence on climate change has never been stronger. The consequences are already visible, measurable, and affecting hundreds of millions of people.
And yet the public conversation remains fragmented, contested, and, in many places, moving in the wrong direction.
We have the science.
Why are we losing the story?
Part of the problem is structural. Independent climate journalism and communications operate within a media ecosystem competing for attention, trust, and resources. Fact-based, locally rooted climate reporting, particularly across the Global South, is often produced with a fraction of the resources available to the forces shaping public narratives around climate and energy.
Part of the problem is geographic.
The global climate narrative is still disproportionately shaped by institutions far from many of the places experiencing its most immediate consequences. Communities living with extreme heat, changing rainfall, flooding, crop losses, displacement, and ecosystem change have some of the most grounded knowledge of what climate change actually looks like.
Yet they often have the least power to determine how that story is told.
There is a cultural challenge too. Climate communications can default toward audiences already familiar with its language: professional, educated, policy-engaged, and often English-speaking. But people encounter climate change through very different languages, identities, livelihoods, political environments, media ecosystems, and cultural reference points.
A message that works at Climate Week may mean very little somewhere else.
And underneath all of this sits a funding problem.
Funders will support reports, campaigns, and communications strategies. It can be much harder to finance the patient infrastructure that allows trusted climate narratives to take root: local journalism, culturally specific storytelling, long-term audience relationships, experimentation with new messengers and channels, and media institutions capable of remaining present after a campaign ends.
This session will ask directly why climate communications is not breaking through at the scale the crisis requires.
Who are we actually communicating with? Who have we stopped trying to reach? Which messengers do people trust? What happens when climate storytelling starts with people's lived realities rather than the sector's preferred language? And what would we need to fund differently if we treated communications not as the final stage of climate work, but as infrastructure for making that work possible?
Discussion Group Leaders
Anjaly Ariyanayagam is Strategy & Communications Officer at Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, advancing systems change through design and communications that can help transformative ideas take root.
Jessica Riches is Existential Crisis Comms Strategist at Saturate Media, advancing bold and culturally relevant climate communications that engage new audiences and accelerate climate action.
Marek Pruszewicz is CEO at Dialogue Earth, advancing independent climate journalism that centers locally rooted perspectives and voices from across the Global South.
What to expect
A candid, practitioner-led conversation moving between journalism, narrative strategy, behavioral science, digital communications, cultural storytelling, and the economics of media.
Participants will examine examples of approaches that have broken through, as well as well-funded or well-researched communications that went nowhere. Particular attention will be paid to journalism and storytelling rooted in the communities experiencing climate change directly and to unconventional channels capable of reaching audiences outside the usual climate conversation.
The room will also examine the funding architecture behind what people see and hear about climate change: what gets financed, what remains chronically underfunded, and whether short-term campaigns can ever substitute for sustained investment in trusted media and communications infrastructure.
Who this is for
This session is for climate journalists, communications strategists, narrative change practitioners, funders of climate communications, media organizations, digital and social media specialists, behavioral scientists, cultural storytellers, and anyone trying to understand why overwhelming evidence has not translated into an equally powerful shared public understanding of climate change.
What you will get out of it
A framework for understanding the structural, geographic, cultural, and financial weaknesses in the current climate communications ecosystem
Ground-level perspectives on what changes when climate journalism begins with the voices and realities of communities experiencing the crisis
Examples of unconventional approaches using entertainment, digital platforms, cultural channels, and different messengers to reach audiences beyond the already-convinced
A clearer understanding of what climate communications funders may need to finance differently, particularly around long-term, locally rooted media infrastructure
Practical questions for journalists, communicators, and funders about what it would take to build a climate communications ecosystem capable of reaching far beyond the climate sector