Why resilience has found its moment in climate communications
By Barry Johnston, Founding Partner
London Climate Action Week is upon us again. I’m sure like me you’ve been flicking through the programme, registering for events across the city and searching for clues to try and separate the signal from the noise. I think I found one.
This year, one word keeps appearing - resilience. Some climate communicators will no doubt roll their eyes at another buzzword. They shouldn’t. The term raises interesting questions about how climate communications are evolving.
Climate narratives are entering a new phase
For much of the last decade, climate communications was dominated by narratives of ambition. Net zero gave organisations a destination. ESG translated environmental and social issues into the language of business. Both helped move climate action from the margins into the mainstream.
Resilience belongs to a different type of narrative. It is less about where we are trying to get to and more about the conditions we are already experiencing. That shift matters because narratives evolve when reality evolves. As climate impacts become more visible in daily life, organisations are increasingly looking for language that helps audiences understand the present, not just imagine the future.
One reason resilience is travelling so effectively is that it links the abstractions of climate change with human experience. People may not spend much time thinking about emissions pathways or climate policy frameworks. They do think about uncertainty, and they recognise the need to prepare for change and recover from setbacks.
Resilience succeeds because it starts where people already are. That offers an important lesson for communicators. Narratives gain traction when they help audiences make sense of the world as they find it.
The five tests of narrative resilience
Adopting a resilience mindset, we can start to appreciate that many established climate narratives are being stress-tested by a changing political and cultural environment.
At Purpose Union, we have come to think of these pressures as five tests of narrative resilience:
Fragmentation asks whether your audience is hearing one story or several. Climate messages increasingly emerge from different teams, channels and partners. Without coordination, organisations can create confusion rather than clarity.
Saturation asks whether your narrative can still earn attention. Climate communications has a volume problem. Campaigns compete in an overcrowded information environment - the challenge is persuading audiences to care.
Distortion asks whether your narrative can withstand attack. Climate misinformation has evolved beyond outright denial. Facts are selectively manipulated and doubt is manufactured. Trust becomes harder to sustain.
Dissonance asks whether your actions reinforce your words. Audiences increasingly judge organisations on the gap between what they say and what they do. When commitments move ahead of visible progress, credibility quickly erodes.
Alienation asks whether your audience understands, and is motivated by, the language you're using. Climate communications remains full of terminology that makes sense to insiders but means little to everyone else. In some cases, familiar climate language has become politically contested, making connection harder rather than easier.
Taken together, these five tests help explain why some sustainability narratives build trust while others struggle to gain traction. They also explain why resilience has become such a powerful idea. As our ecological and economic systems strive to become more resilient, our communications must too.
Resilient Narrative Framework
At Purpose Union, we’re working with a variety of clients actively looking to address these five tests and to embed resilience into their narratives. Out of that we developed a Resilient Narrative Framework designed to help organisations understand how their sustainability communications perform under real-world pressure and where they are most vulnerable to losing trust.
In a world that urgently needs to build its resilience to the unfolding climate crisis, the role of the communicators today is to build narratives that are strong enough to survive the environment they are entering.
If you'd like to understand how your climate communications perform against the five tests of narrative resilience, get in touch, or sign up to our Climate Counsel newsletter here.