A Website on Climate Change and COVID-19

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The COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented global reach, making itself apparent and relevant in the lives of most everyone around the world. Climate change has and will continue to have a similar global reach, but its effects are less obvious to many and feel less pressing than those of COVID-19. Because of this, many of us who truly value our planet and its inhabitants fail to take action on climate change with the same zeal, revealing an attitude-behavior gap where our beliefs do not match up with our actions (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018, pg. 221). 

In hopes of igniting a new urgency toward climate change and ultimately motivating individuals to take part in concrete action, I created a website that explores the relationship between climate change and COVID-19. 

Process

To achieve an effective communication piece, I referred to class concepts outlined in Pezzullo and Cox's Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere. 

I knew from the beginning that, in order to encourage action, I needed to employ a more hopeful frame that focuses on the opportunity we have now instead of using an apocalyptic rhetoric that emphasizes a potential future of doom (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018, pg. 58). To do this, my communication piece discusses the differences between climate change and COVID-19 instead of lingering on their upsetting albeit important similarities. 

Then, I decided that the best way to convey my message would be to design a website with Canva. The creativity afforded by visual and digital media would allow me to create an engaging communication piece and implement hypermediacy, using elements like hyperlinks to connect users with related content (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018, pg. 236), to lead individuals straight to useful action resources.

When I constructed my narrative, I made a continuous effort to avoid the deficit model, or the assumption that misunderstandings or inaction on science-related issues is due to the public lacking relevant knowledge (Nisbet & Scheufele, 2009). I did this by supplementing simple statements like "We know it's happening" with a basic explanation instead of describing the detailed science of carbon emissions. 

When it came time to share my website, I created a Twitter account and sent out a mini email campaign. I generated tweets that shared my message and retweeted relevant stories. Through email, I kept things simple and professional to persuade people to visit the site. This sharing process was the most difficult part of this project due to the time constraints of our block schedule, and if I had more time, I think I would have been able to create a stronger Twitter following and interactions. 

  

Outcome

To track whether or not I met my overall goal of encouraging concrete action, I came up with two measurable goals: to receive a minimum of 15 website visits and 5 Twitter interactions. In the end, I was somewhat successful. I received over double the expected website visits, but I fell short by one with my Twitter interactions. However, it seems that my Twitter reached wider audiences than intended because I had several website visits from European countries!

Overall, it is difficult to say whether or not this site fulfilled my overarching goal of motivating climate action, but it feels good to have spread a message of realistic hope for climate change. Combating climate change can feel like an impossible feat at times and even more so during a global pandemic. However, as my website notes, we have everything we need to begin fighting now. The only question is: what are you willing to do?

References

Nisbet, M. C., & Scheufele, D. A. (2009). What's next for science communication? Promising 

    directions and lingering distractions. American Journal of Botany, 96(10), 1-12. 10.3732/ajb.0900041

Pezzullo, P. C., & Cox, R. (2018). Environmental communication and the public sphere. (5th ed.)

    SAGE Publications.

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