Conversations about climate change can quickly go south. Here are 6 ways to make them better

Conversations about climate change can get really uncomfortable, really quickly, whether they’re happening in a meeting room or at your family’s annual summer barbecue.

It’s enough to make even those who are really concerned about the problem want to steer clear of the topic. 

But those chats between colleagues, family members and friends are actually really essential, says climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.

Research shows that scientists are “fairly trusted messengers, but we’re not number one,” Hayhoe told What on Earth guest host Falen Johnson. “The most trusted messenger on climate change, according to the social science, is people we know — friends, family, neighbours, colleagues.”

Here’s how expert facilitators and climate scientists and advocates say we can apply principles from conflict resolution to make those climate conversations go better, and get more of us on the same page about the things we need to do to slow and adapt to climate change.

Get (a little more) comfortable with discomfort

Hayhoe said that polling shows “the vast majority” of people in Canada and the U.S. care about climate, but that only 50 per cent ever talk about it.

But Samantha Slade, founder of Montreal-based Percolab Co-op, says to solve climate change, we need to learn to communicate in ways that bring us closer together and help us collaborate. 

The network of research labs hosts “conflict cafes” where participants can bring the tricky issues they’re dealing with and work through them with a group. 

“One of the practices … is living with discomfort and the idea that discomfort is healthy and normal,” said Slade. “And if we want to do the deep transitions that our world needs, part of that is we don’t always have to be comfortable all the time because deep change can feel uncomfortable. And that’s OK.”

Focus on common ground

Your uncle, who has a lot of friends who work in the oil patch, may be skeptical about what a green transition is going to mean for jobs. But there’s likely something in your shared experience where your values align, says Hayhoe, a Canadian currently working as a professor at Texas Tech university in Lubbock, Texas.

“These conversations are best approached through empathy, through trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and also through focusing on what we have in common rather than what divides us,” said Hayhoe, who has a PhD in atmospheric science.

For example, the sound engineer she met recording the audio version of her book Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World approached her with some skeptical questions on climate change.

Rather than starting to pepper him with facts, Hayhoe says she asked him how long he’d lived in the town where they both reside.

“Pretty soon he was telling me about how he grew up fishing, and now he takes his grandchildren fishing. And I said, ‘Do you feel like things have changed?’ And then he was telling me all about how the lake was getting warmer and it was clogged with algae and the fish weren’t the same.”

Next they connected over their shared hobby, downhill skiing, and the slopes in nearby New Mexico that haven’t had enough snow in recent years. At the end of the conversation, he was asking what he should do about climate change.

Aftab Erfan says that’s the right approach. As the executive director of the Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, she specializes in constructive dialogue on contentious issues. 

“If we go into a lot of these conversations with the sense that, ‘I’m right and I’m going to convince somebody else,’ as if there’s almost like a moral obligation to bring somebody else to my way of seeing things, that almost never works,” said Erfan, who has a background in environmental sciences and a PhD in planning.

Keep it local 

You could be worried about what’s going on in Canada’s Arctic or in the Antarctic, but it might not be the skinny polar bears or melting glaciers that resonate most with your neighbour who idles his big pickup truck with the AC running.   

Those events happening far from home are “not what’s going to get people to understand why this matters,” said Hayhoe.

“We need to talk about how it was so hot that I got heat stroke the other day from, you know, playing a sport outside. We need to talk about how our insurance rates have doubled because of the increase in flood risk or wildfire risk, or how we couldn’t go outside last summer because the air was choked with smoke.”

Tell a (vulnerable) story

When Teegan Walshe, a high school student from Qualicum Beach, B.C., was conducting school strikes with a friend during the past school year to draw attention to climate issues, they were confronted by a lot of angry grownups.

But the pair, who were in Grade 11 at the time, learned that — rather than sticking to talking points — it helped to tell a personal story.

“It’s best if it’s something about you or someone close to you, and some way that you’re affected by the issue in your own life,” Walshe said.

“For example, I bike to school with one of my good friends. And at the end of last year it was so smoky out that she couldn’t bike with me because she had really bad asthma. It was scary because she couldn’t go outside and bike, and it disrupted our everyday life.” 

Check your privilege

There can be a lot of conflict surrounding the best individual actions to take on climate change, said Erfan, but not everyone can make the same changes.

“In some ways it’s a privilege to be able to do the right things for the environment right now,” she said. “You have to be able to afford the electric car or the efficient appliances or the heat pump for your home.”

Likewise, it’s fortunate to have family that lives close enough to see them without emissions heavy air travel, she said.

Too often these nuances are dismissed in conversations about doing the so-called right thing, said Erfan.

Prioritize the relationship

Conflict resolution is always a balance between one’s relationship to the other party and the advocacy you want to do, Erfan says. You don’t want to be so afraid of rocking the boat that you don’t get to call attention to an important issue, she said, but equally it doesn’t make sense to damage a relationship for the sake of making your point. 

“When the wildfires come, or extreme heat events happen or hurricanes or whatever, it’s in our neighbours, and people who care about us, who are going to help us, who are going to save communities. And so we can’t, we can’t discard the importance of relationship.”