A bit more than recycling, please

2026-03-09 - 16:07

Opinion: One moment in New Zealand’s 2023 general election campaign will forever stick in my mind as a marker of how far we still have to go on climate change: the September 19 leaders’ debate. It had already been a tortuously long and deeply unedifying campaign, as the two leaders of the major parties scrapped to convince a disengaged public that one of them was fit to be Prime Minister. The polls were clear that no one really wanted either of them. But they were who we were (and are) stuck with, so the first televised debate was still a big deal. Nonetheless, I groaned audibly at their answers to debate questions about climate change. One asked what they were doing in their personal lives to reduce their impacts on the atmosphere. “As a family, we embraced recycling some time ago,” Christopher Luxon said. “I have an EV, I’m a recycler,” Chris Hipkins followed. A 2020 study evaluated 61 actions people could take to reduce their personal and household emissions, calculating which were the most impactful for slashing greenhouse gases. Recycling came 60th — one from the bottom. The impact on carbon pollution was virtually negligible. The misconception held by the two Chrises, that recycling was a very useful thing to do in the climate context, is also believed widely by people all across the country. In fact, an Ipsos poll earlier that year asked 1002 Kiwis to name three personal actions that would make the biggest difference for the climate. Recycling was the most consistently selected, with 45 percent of respondents counting it in their top three. Living car-free, the number one-ranked action by the 2020 study, was picked by just 12 percent of respondents. Reporting on that poll in 2023 had already showed me how far the public needs to come on understanding climate change. The debate answers only reinforced the scale of the problem. Even if a nurse or plumber or accountant understandably might not grasp the complexity of the climate crisis, surely the two men vying to lead the country should know what they were talking about. There are many obstacles to progress on climate. It is a wicked problem, requiring economics, policy, science and technology, and more to solve it. But it is also partly a communications problem. The two reasons our political leaders take insufficient action on climate – and spend too little time learning about it – are because they feel no pressure to do so, or lack the mandate for it. Pressure necessarily comes from the public. From the people who elected them and who may not do so when the next ballot comes around. For the leaders who genuinely do want to do more on climate, but feel their hands are bound, permission rather than pressure is needed. These politicians are ahead of the public and need to build social licence for transformation so they don’t go beyond their mandate and get turfed out at the next election. Former climate change minister James Shaw once told me the September 2019 School Strike 4 Climate – New Zealand’s largest-ever protest, turning out 3.5 percent of the population in the streets of big cities and small towns alike – came as the Labour-led coalition was finalising the Zero Carbon Act. The 40,000 protesters outside Parliament (one-fifth of Wellington’s population) gave Jacinda Ardern the confidence she needed to authorise more ambitious methane targets, Shaw said. Creating first the permission or social licence for change and then building the pressure to make sure it happens isn’t an easy process. There is at least one prerequisite: information. Communications are the process by which people disseminate and receive information. When 45 percent of the population is thinking about climate change as an environmental problem which can be fixed by recycling, communications is a critical part of building the public mandate for political, social and economic change. While I think the media by and large does its best to report on climate change, there are two significant areas for improvement. One is the proliferation of the climate beat into every other journalistic round. As the impacts of climate change become clearer, as the solutions filter more and more into every sector of society, every journalist should be a climate journalist. Just as at the height of the Covid-19 crisis it would have been unimaginable for a business, political, or even sports reporter to not be across the ways the pandemic was affecting their area of expertise, so it must be with climate change. On this, the New Zealand media has improved over time. After historic flooding devastated the West Coast in July 2021, I trawled through the media coverage of the event. Just one in five articles mentioned climate change and barely half actually attributed the increased frequency and intensity of such storms to a warming atmosphere. In 2023, however, the Auckland Anniversary weekend floods and Cyclone Gabrielle were reported in the context of climate change. Meteorological reports explained how, with every 1C of air temperature heating, the atmosphere holds 7 percent more water. Political reporters questioned ministers and MPs about climate adaptation policy, and business journalists went to insurers and banks to understand how climate was affecting their operations. It is inevitable that more journalists will incorporate climate change into their thinking and reporting. The impacts are becoming more clear. The cyclone is the most obvious example of this, but the transition is affecting our daily lives as well. EVs and home solar are no longer a niche, greenie interest but an increasingly normalised part of life. New Zealand’s journalists are good at their jobs and this phenomenon won’t pass them by. The second area for improvement is climate reporting as its own specialty, like business or political or sport reporting. While climate touches every other part of society, it also needs its own discrete media attention. The painfully opaque IPCC reports, the complexity of the Emissions Trading Scheme, these things require specialised knowledge and dedicated reporters. On this, the New Zealand media has a poor record. Only one outlet has ever formally launched a climate team: Stuff, in 2020, with its Forever Project. Just two reporters were ever formally part of that team and neither are working as journalists anymore. They were not replaced by Stuff. More specialised reporting is needed to hold those in power to account and to do the crucial work of providing information to the public, to build a mandate for change. Unfortunately, there is currently no money in climate reporting. Outside of smaller outlets which have built a reputation for pointed coverage of the crisis (like Newsroom), climate stories tend to reach far fewer people than other forms of reporting. That makes it difficult to persuade editors to put the money into hiring climate journalists and setting up dedicated teams. Inspiration can be drawn from other countries who have dedicated teams and outlets – think CarbonBrief, Heatmap and Grist. In New Zealand, the audience isn’t yet there. But it could be. I have hope that a subscriber-based model could become viable as climate becomes a greater feature in our everyday lives. Why is climate journalism not a money-maker? In 2020, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found 47 percent of respondents to a global poll of 80,155 people said the media did a ‘fairly good’ or ‘very good’ job at providing accurate information about climate change. A third of respondents said the media did neither well nor poorly, while the remaining 19 percent said the media does ‘fairly bad’ or ‘very bad’. Breaking those responses down further, however, and 56 percent of those who view climate change as a serious problem rate media coverage highly, compared to just 16 percent of those who said it wasn’t serious. In other words, media coverage of climate is better at serving those who are already engaged on climate change than it is with those who are disengaged or even dismissive. Over the years, the sector has deployed a variety of strategies to try to widen the audience for climate coverage. Some have focused on the risks of climate change, thinking that fear could prompt people to engagement and then to action. Others have gone the other way, promulgating solutions to journalism in the hopes that hope itself will mobilise people. However, the evidence from psychological research is increasingly suggesting that these are wrongheaded approaches. In a 2020 paper, neuroscientist and University College London Climate Action Unit director Kris de Meyer and colleagues wrote about the shift in mindset that communicators, including media, need to more effectively motivate people to act. “What all these views have in common is the assumption that a certain mental state (knowledge, understanding, awareness, beliefs, values, positive or negative attitudes and emotions) is the key to unlocking climate action. So far, the evidence for this is in short supply,” they wrote. What’s missing from most climate coverage isn’t a positive or negative framing, but an agency- and action-based conceptualisation of climate change as primarily something we know how to act on, rather than an issue-based framing of a threat we should be concerned about. A story about pricing agricultural emissions, for example, could detail the tools available to farmers to reduce their climate impacts alongside the analysis of the policy proposal. A book about climate change could detail the solutions available to us in New Zealand to take us forward. When I discussed the climate superpowers with my wife, it clicked for her almost immediately. She’s a member of a religious community (an organisational participant) that owns three properties in Wellington. Were those properties using fossil fuels for heating or cooking? Could they electrify those and add on solar as well? These were valuable questions that could easily make a difference, but they wouldn’t have come to mind if not for the prompt to expand her thinking of where she has influence. ‘Organisational participant’ is a big umbrella. It could also mean employee at a company (could the break-room use mugs rather than single-use takeaway cups?), organiser of a community event (perhaps encourage attendees to come by public transport) or even a journalist at a media outlet (maybe we need a dedicated climate reporter). Then there are the role models. The pastor at church, who talks about how climate change is affecting God’s creation. The kaumātua who makes sure non-dairy milk is available at the marae. Or the politicians who cycle to work or even to hospital to have a baby. They play an essential role in modelling climate-positive behaviour to their communities. And yet, many of those best placed to exert influence on the climate seem unaware of their power. De Meyer and his colleagues wrote in 2020 about exactly this issue: “In our work, we frequently encounter people who say, ‘I am very concerned about climate change personally, but I cannot see how I can do anything about it in my work or professional context’. These people included journalists, lawyers, oil company executives and even elected politicians.” We saw exactly the same thing play out here in New Zealand, back in September 2023. Asked about their actions to tackle climate change, neither the then-Leader of Opposition Christopher Luxon nor the-then Prime Minister Chris Hipkins offered up anything more inspiring than recycling. This is frustrating. But it isn’t insurmountable. What Luxon and Hipkins need is to imagine the influence they could have if they tapped into their considerable climate superpowers. We can help them get there by building the public mandate for meaningful action on climate change – something that will only happen with a communications strategy that empowers people to take their own effective actions. A mildly abbreviated chapter taken with kind permission from the newly published anthology of climate-change writing Kiwis in Climate: Voices for Climate Solutions in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Tessa Vincent (Bateman Books, $45), available in bookstores nationwide. Thirty contributors, including CEOs, scientists, youth advocates and journalists, comment on ways to “mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change”.