Increasing climate awareness through science/communication collaboration: the CMCC multi-platform approach

Climate awareness is the starting point for understanding how climate change triggers and contributes to the climate crisis. A public that is aware is made up of citizens who are able to manage the best way to learn about the climate system and its changes and to understand how climate interacts with the individual and collective sphere of each person. Climate awareness provides everything citizens need to play an active role in addressing the negative impacts of climate change on people's lives, seize opportunities and be conscious actors in the present we are living and the future we shape for younger generations. Given the multidisciplinary, cross-cutting and all-comprehensive dimension of the interaction between climate and socio-economic systems (both on a local and global scale), improving Climate awareness requires more than just making reliable information and data available. There is an urgent need for strategic perspectives, critical thinking, and innovative outreach platforms and tools. 

To answer this challenge, the CMCC is implementing an outreach and communication strategy that addresses the complexity of the issue by implementing a multi-platform approach to climate literacy. The target audiences for this approach are as diverse as many social actors are involved in the process of improving their own climate literacy and, thus, contribute to the spread of more advanced climate awareness. These include public opinion as a whole, but specific initiatives and languages should be used to target specific audiences, such as students, journalists, policymakers, and civil society. Thus, the CMCC multi-platform approach addresses the climate crisis in the relationships between target audiences and media in their cultural, social, historical, economic and technological contexts. We present a series of concrete and ongoing initiatives that make up an integrated climate literacy strategy combining storytelling of climate impacts and adaptation solutions, the journalistic vision of a magazine, visual storytelling, podcast, art/science dialogue, science/communication collaboration about IPCC reports and the building of a community/network of climate communication initiatives through a climate communication international award.