How do you explain climate change adaptation to stakeholders?

Before I engage an audience, I suss out the unique climate implications for that community to understand how I can best communicate climate adaptation to their specific context. For example, I regularly engage rural conservative folks on the impacts of a warming planet. Their values surround family, faith, tradition, and land-based relationships. This audience has its own stories of how the climate has changed and what their communities are doing about it; they just don't relate to the language espoused by the legacy news media, politicians, and corporations. I use language and experiences they can relate to and feel safe using to communicate climate change adaptation.

Climate change adaptation is a strategic, proactive response to climate crisis, involving understanding forecasts, identifying vulnerabilities, building resilience, flexibility, cost-benefit analysis, collaboration, regulatory compliance, continuous monitoring, success stories, and shared responsibility. It involves understanding forecasts, assessing vulnerabilities, focusing on long-term benefits, and framing adaptation as a collective effort.

When speaking to conservatives, I identify key values in their communities that are already experiencing the impacts of climate change. For example, there's a demonstrable increase in disease, invasive species, and ecosystem degradation that outdoors people and science can agree with. By focusing on the immediate impacts these folks have observed in their lifetimes, we're able to follow a string of cause-and-effect that's guided by their own experiences and stories. Their witness to these changes affirms what science is saying, and can open up a meaningful dialogue for mitigating and adapting to these changes in order to protect their values.

The beauty of climate solutions is that we will be better off in every imaginable way if we implement them now. Protecting and restoring forests, wetlands, grasslands, and riparian zones are potent climate adaptation tools, and they also improve the quality of hunting, fishing, farming, and outdoor recreation activities valued by conservative communities. A solution-focused approach draws attention to the immediate benefits of a climate solution as well as provides tangible ways the community can use their skills and passions to own and implement the adaptation process.

I make regular use of information from the NOAA's Climate at a Glance tool to show how various climate indicators have changed over the centuries. Other valuable visualization tools include forest succession and migration (check out the Forest Service's Tree Atlas), historical photos and videos, and more. The beauty of these visualizations is that they draw from historical observations, most of which predate the politicization of climate. Folks are more likely to be convinced by the data when they see that it is free of the bias that they believe is inherent in the modern discussion of climate mitigation and adaptation.

"Climate brokers" - a term coined by University of Michigan professor Andy Hoffman - are people who belong to the community you are communicating with who hold places of influence and are capable of telling truthful stories of adaptation. Climate brokers are people the community trusts and can include pastors, weather station anchors, local politicians and business leaders, farmers, foresters, and more. When these folks share their narratives, they become powerfully relatable stories that the community can own and resonate with.