Environmental Sustainability in Practice

The Use of Visuals

Humans are visual creatures. We rely on vision as the primary sense for receiving information about our external world and making sense of it. The last two decades have seen a major shift in how the public consumes information, due to our increasing use of the Internet. Increasingly, news websites and social media provide their audiences with brief snapshots of information, often linking to longer stories or reports. Correspondingly, visuals (i.e., pictures and videos), are playing an important part in this shift in communicating and receiving information. In particular, the use of visuals as an information-medium and a tool to influence beliefs and behaviour is becoming increasingly commonplace.

Environmental communicators need to understand this shift and be able to incorporate appropriate visual elements in order to sell their ‘product’, whether that product is education on the environmental impacts of human activities, such as fracking or mining, or the promotion of corporate social responsibility initiatives.

In the case of climate change, most people tend to get their information from television, Internet, and print media (see figure below).

The results of this study (Morris & Pickering, 2017) reinforce the potentially powerful influence of images in affecting behaviour about climate change. While some images appear to be representative of climate change across multiple countries – particularly melting icebergs and smokestacks– there are differences depending on the audience. This difference becomes important when choosing the best image to accompany or illustrate a report or story. The visual representativeness of climate change can vary depending on people's pro-environmental values, beliefs surrounding the cause(s) of climate change, and several socio-demographic factors, including political affiliation and education.

Importantly, this same study showed that the emotional impact elicited by various photos depicting climate change impacts and causes differed. So, knowing your audience and their likely emotional response is important in selecting the best visual elements to communicate your message. So how do we best communicate climate change using visuals? 

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