Communicating climate science: The case of IPCC

Welcome to a UTRI Transformation Talk in collaboration with the Arctic Centre and hosted by Humlab with support of Faculty of Arts and Humanity. This event highlight climate communication using the IPCC as a case. Our invited guest speaker Dr James Painter, Oxford University starts with a presentation followed by a disussion with invited panelists and other participants.

Moderator: Annika Egan Sjölander, professor at the Department of Culture and Media Studies and leader of UTRI (Umeå Transformation Research Initiative).  

Join the online event: Zoom

Program: 

13.00 Welcome

13.10 Communicating climate science: some reflections on the IPCC with Dr James Painter. (See more info on the talk below)

13.50 Fika

14.10 Panel discussion and Q&A

Annika Nordlund, member of The Climate Policy Council and associate professor at the Department of Psychology at Umeå university

Maria Nilsson, Professor at Department of Epidemiology and Global Health at Umeå university

Jennie Vennberg, Communications officer with focus on climate at Umeå kommun  

Keith Larson, Project coordinator at Department of Ecology and Environmental Science and diretor of the arctic centre at Umeå university 

14:55 Closing session

Talk with James Painter: Communicating climate science: some reflections on the IPCC

An increasing amount of academic research has focused on what is ‘effective communication’ around climate science – both how to theorize it and operationalize it.  Different approaches have highlighted the different purposes of communication, the role played by mainstream and social media, the importance of appropriate messengers, and the primacy of audience segmentation. As the world’s leading authority on climate science, the IPCC has in recent years put more resources into communicating with its key audience (policy makers), and its secondary audiences (including journalists).  In this talk, I look at different dimensions of the IPCC’s communication efforts – the evolution of ‘key messages’, the importance of training scientists to communicate with different types of policy makers, the media reporting of IPCC reports and scenarios, and how the IPCC can’t control the ‘messaging’ on social media.