It’s not naïve to be hopeful about climate change. To the contrary, it’s the only responsible attitude.
So says Elin Kelsey, a climate change communication scholar, educator and author.
Kelsey has a PhD in environmental policy and works on communications projects that affect engagement in environmental efforts. She is also an adjunct faculty member of the University of Victoria School of Environmental Studies, a children’s book author, and the author of “Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis,” a book for adults.
Kelsey, 60, on the phone for a series on managing and responding productively to anxiety about climate change.
The following are excerpts of Kelsey’s conversation with They have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Focus on evidence-based solutions
What we’re seeing all over the world is a real rise in people’s concern about climate change, and their desire to do something about it and their deep feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that nothing can be done.
That becomes a critical issue, in my opinion, for engagement.
I would argue that we fuel that sense of helplessness and hopelessness inadvertently by rising alarms about these very honest and important and urgent global issues because almost all the news we hear about the environment is in a problem identification and not a solutions orientation.
We come away with the feeling that nothing is happening and that it’s too late.
I’m also a children’s book writer. And so I often find myself with very young children talking about these issues. And I started to realize that we put things like ratings on movies or on on scenes of violence in films and say, “This is not appropriate for a young child.”
And yet, there’s nothing seemingly wrong with walking into a classroom and telling a child that Earth is ruined, or showing them the doomsday clock going down with climate change predictions. We just have not been sensitive enough about the emotional landscape for young children.
That gloom-and-doom narrative is being fed by the very real issues that we face and by the fact that we only hear about problems almost predominantly.
One part that we can really shift, and that needs to shift, is we also need to be talking about evidence-based solutions. That’s why it’s exciting to me to see the birth of fields like solutions journalism (that are looking just as rigorously at solutions as how appropriate they are in particular settings and which parts of them might be transferable or amplified or tailored) as they are looking at problems.
That’s the direction we need to be going in.
We need to make solutions much more accessible so that people are aware of the changes that are actually happening and things that they care about so they don’t feel alone in their concerns. We need to take away this inaccurate message that nothing positive is actually happening, and that no good outcomes are happening, because it just isn’t true.
To be hopeless is to be uninformed. We are, in fact, collectively uninformed because we are inundated by this gloom-and-doom narrative to the point where we simply do not hear much about anything productive that is happening. Then we interpret that to be the truth.
So, for example, we know that right now, more than 110 countries have have set net zero carbon emission goals by 2050. And that represents more than 70% of the world’s economy. That’s an important thing to note.
Now, do we need to move there quicker? Absolutely. Do we need to hold them accountable to those kinds of promises? Absolutely. But knowing that that is the case is different than thinking no countries are doing anything.
Optimism does not lead to complacency
What we do know from the psychological literature is fear and shame causes us to shut down and give up.
A lot of people are afraid that if you talk about hope, you’re actually going to breed complacency during a time when you need urgent action.
But the psychological literature shows us that it’s actually the opposite.
When you think others care about things that you care about — and you have a sense of pride that some things are moving in the direction they should and the determination, the to stick-to-it-ness, the empathy and compassion for others who care about what you do — you’re way more likely to stay and do the difficult work.
Whereas when you think something is hopeless, and you have this hope gap, or this climate doom, as Michael Mann calls it, then you feel helpless, you tend to feel isolated, and you tend to have apathy, which means you disempower yourself, and you lose your agency and you give up.
So it’s actually opposite to what we intuitively think.
