As summer heats up and the headlines begin to highlight the newest extreme heat this year, here’s how to communicate extreme heat and its impacts. 

Connect Locally
We know it’s getting hotter everywhere, but showing a nationwide map of heat won’t get your community to act. Instead, talk about how heat impacts the places where your audience lives, works, and plays. Working with Albemarle County, we developed a Climate Vulnerability and Risk Assessment and included photos taken at two local playgrounds that illustrate the heat-reducing effect of trees– and the danger to young children playing in areas without shade. Hitting close to home reduces psychological distance bias–the perception that things affect others but not oneself–and makes individuals more likely to take action.

Photos provided by Peggy and Jake Van Yahres

Visualize Temperature
Instead of talking about the data, let the data talk for itself. Climate scientist Ed Hawkins developed the ‘climate stripes’ visualization to convey a century-long story of warming without the need for numbers, graphs, or jargon. If you haven’t seen these before, each stripe represents an annual mean temperature and the darker red the stripe, the hotter the year.

The interactive #ShowYourStripes tool allows you to choose the continent, country, and select cities to generate the climate stripes at a more local level.

Frame the Impacts
Instead of leading with the environmental impacts of extreme heat events, focus on the impacts of heat to the community. Most audiences will weigh these impacts more heavily as they picture how they or their loved ones might be affected. 

💰 Warmer temperatures mean a higher cost to cool your home.

💰 Farmers will experience agricultural losses due to extreme heat and drought. 

🏥 Heat-related illnesses will increase, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations such as older adults, children, people who work outdoors, and low-income communities. 

🏥 Warmer years lead to more ticks and mosquitos, that in turn lead to increased disease transmission. 

🔨 Extreme heat events overwhelm the power grid, leading to power outages.

🔨 Heat causes disruptions in transportation as roads, railways, and bridges buckle under the heat.

Discuss Solutions
Highlight the range of available solutions, acknowledging both the immediate actions that will facilitate adaptation AND the long-term actions to mitigate extreme heat. Offering specific community and individual-level solutions helps motivate your audience to take action.

Need help talking to your audience about climate change impacts? We’d love to chat– hello@greenfinstudio.com.