Through its unique capacity for narrative transportation and its ability to create strong parasocial bonds with familiar and loved characters, mass media entertainment provides new and exciting ways to support and expand the landscape of climate education. Savvy representations of climate change and climate solutions in mass media can deliver informal climate education with the ability to reach diverse and potentially disengaged audiences at scale. Creative professionals in the entertainment industry are already including climate themes and sustainability in content across genres and formats. In parallel, there is a growing ecosystem of environmental non-profits, research institutions, and industry-affiliated groups that provides support to this effort. Integrating these entertainment-based efforts into existing programs of climate education, communication, and outreach could both increase the breadth of audiences for these programs, while also improving their ability to empower individuals and communities to address climate change. This poster: (i) provides a landscape analysis of key stakeholders and initiatives supporting the development, production, and distribution of climate-relevant programming within mass media entertainment; (ii) through case studies, explores how research can inform the use of entertainment to inspire climate action at scale; (iii) highlights specific examples of climate representation in popular entertainment; and, (iv) identifies empirically-grounded recommendations for narrative framing.

Storytelling is a powerful tool for supporting climate literacy. Media can reflect the changes that communities are already making and connect viewers to resources for participating in climate action. This summary provides a touch point for what is currently ongoing in Hollywood as a growing community of practice to include climate mitigation and adaptation information within scripted mainstream media, provide an overview of current challenges, and present suggestions for future work to integrate commercial media into the ecosystem of informal climate education. The new Climate Literacy Guide developed by the U.S. Global Change Research Program can help shape the next decade of storytelling as we build capacity for climate change communication.

Science centers and museums are increasingly exploring a range of approaches for encouraging their visitors and communities to not only learn about climate solutions but also to discover their own pathways to sustained, meaningful participation in action. These institutions have unique opportunities to cultivate a culture of hope and action thanks to their local expertise, diverse programming (e.g., field trips, special events, and community science projects), and wide reach (including both in-person and online interactions). These assets enable science centers and museums to communicate about climate solutions in ways that are visible, relatable, and accessible, all attributes that make them more likely to be taken up. One approach that several museums and other groups have piloted is the use of a GIS-based tool to invite members of their community to share the climate actions they're undertaking and explore those of others. The tool produces open-access climate action maps that showcase real actions taking place in a particular community and provide an opportunity to leverage several evidence-based practices for communicating about climate solutions. By featuring everyday people who live in one's community, doing actions that are broadly accessible, the maps build a sense of agency, provide inspiration, convey action-oriented norms, and build a sense of belonging in climate solutions. We will describe (a) the ways that this flexible tool and resulting maps can be embedded in a range of museum contexts, and (b), the ways in which contributing to and exploring the map can benefit museums, their visitors, and their communities. We will also discuss opportunities for increasing impact through connections with local media, decision-makers, and K-12 school systems. This work demonstrates the role that science museums can play as hubs for collecting and coordinating climate stories and resources, and promoting community-led participation in climate action.

Science centers and museums are increasingly exploring a range of approaches for encouraging their visitors and communities to not only learn about climate solutions, but to discover their own pathways to sustained, meaningful participation in action. These place-based institutions have unique opportunities to cultivate a culture of hope and action thanks to their local expertise, diverse programming (e.g., field trips, special events, and community science projects), and wide reach (including both in-person and online interactions). These assets enable science centers and museums to communicate about climate solutions in ways that are visible, relatable, and accessible, all attributes that make them more likely to be taken up. One approach that several museums and other groups have piloted is the use of a GIS-based tool to invite members of their community to share the climate actions they’re undertaking and explore those of others. The tool produces open-access climate action maps that showcase real actions taking place in a particular community and provide an opportunity to leverage several evidence-based practices for communicating about climate solutions. By featuring everyday people who live in one’s community, doing actions that are broadly accessible, the maps build a sense of agency, provide inspiration, convey action-oriented norms, and build a sense of belonging in climate solutions. We will describe the ways that this flexible tool and resulting map can be embedded in a range of museum contexts and will discuss the ways that contributing to and exploring the map benefits museums, their visitors, and communities. We will also discuss opportunities for increasing impact through connections with local media, decision-makers, and K-12 school systems. This work demonstrates the role that science museums can play as hubs for collecting and coordinating climate stories and actionable resource centers for increasing community-led participation in climate action.

Public health communication strategies, including entertainment-education, can effectively change human behavior, improving health outcomes from climate change. Tools from social psychology, including social modeling and building self and collective efficacy, can help us to create a new model for current, culturally-relevant stories that can help communities adapt to climate change. As an example we will share key learnings from Rhythm and Glue, an applied television prototype, based on research from an NSF Advancing Informal STEM Learning submission. Best practices for climate communication include adaptations of entertainment-education techniques for culturally grounded representations of climate engagement positive outliers. As science communication progresses in adapting social psychology and sociology practices for climate communication, we would like to share how this prototype applies the methods and suggests some new directions that further adapt the practices to account for limited resources and media fragmentation challenges. While this work focuses on climate, it has broad implications for future science communication practices.

Climate communication involves deep community engagement and multiple parallel behavior interventions for a wide array of audiences. Images include large amounts of culturally nuanced details that can improve the social uptake of community climate interventions. Image specificity grounds information within subgroups improving the relatability and accuracy of emerging regional interventions. We experimented with using ArcGIS to collect and sort regionally and topically sorted climate mitigation and resilience behaviors. We'll review how our team set up a feedback loop in Survey123 and ArcGIS and how this might be useful in future climate messaging.