Narratives matter. They shape how we understand, think about and act in the real world. If we can shift how people see and engage with heat, we can shift how they behave and, ultimately, encourage them to adapt, together.
Here are five key things we learnt about shifting the narrative on heat over this past summer:
In every country we surveyed, more than 88% of people see heatwaves as a future threat. Awareness is no longer the challenge, what matters now is transforming that awareness into collective action.
Whilst health remains the top concern, people are increasingly speaking about financial impacts: higher electricity bills, lost income, and productivity loss.
When communicators focus only on health, we risk missing the broader story. We underrepresent stories that have more power to drive action, for example, the economic, financial or security impacts can spur faster political and social action.
Almost two-thirds of Greeks told us that if government action fails, communities should step in. However, fewer people believed they actually could. Our narratives must shape and encourage this idea that communities should and can have a role to play in their own adaptation. Our role should be to make those efforts visible and replicable – showing what’s possible when people adapt together.
Our research shows that people’s belief in their ability to act grows with social capital — the trust, relationships, and cooperation they share. Adaptation offers unique opportunities to build this social capital, be it Water Guardians coming together to fight against drought, olive cooperatives working together or community cooling centres for migrant women to connect and stay cool.
All of these stories highlight this shift from powerlessness and fear to community, connection and agency (our belief in our ability to take action with impact)
As our journalist workshops highlighted, the visual language around heatwaves in Europe and North America is stuck, symbolic, fun-in-the sun or doom and gloom. These images reinforce a narrative of either a normalisation of the extreme or driving helplessness and denial. Instead we need images that tell the diverse impact but that also demonstrate what community-led adaptation looks like, normalising people like me and you acting together to keep themselves and their communities safe and cool.
What we learnt however are the challenges in creating and finding these images and are working closely with a group of journalists as part of our Extreme Weather Story Lab to come up with new ways to visualise and shift the narrative on heat and extreme weather.
See the full Heatwave Monitor results for Greece, Croatia, and Hungary
Download our campaign and narrative tools for communicators and campaigners
Discover our photo stories celebrating adaptation and community action.
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