Communicators Swap Stories at ClimateWatch Workshop
Caitlyn Kennedy
NOAA Climate Program Office
June 22, 2009 — It might not be a plot line in your new summer beach read, but climate change could be the year’s biggest story you haven’t read — yet.
Not only is the public buzzing about climate change, they want clear direction as to what they can do at home and in their neighborhoods to help avert a climate crisis. Likewise, reporters are thirsty for stories about climate impacts, and they are increasingly looking to NOAA for compelling content.
Nationally-recognized storyteller Andy Goodman discusses storytelling strategies at NOAA’s Climate Program Office’s ClimateWatch Editorial Workshop. Goodman refers to scientific data as the "elephant in the room," in that science communicators often lose their audiences in a flood of data and facts, instead of engaging them with compelling stories.
Photo credit: Caitlyn Kennedy, NOAA OAR.
Communicators across NOAA are working hard to harness the power of effective storytelling to engage the public, the media and policy makers about climate change and to promote climate literacy. And, here’s why: research has shown that people who receive information in the form of a story tend to understand it better, retain it longer and are better able to apply it to their own lives.
In early June, more than 100 climate communicators gathered at the NOAA Science Center in Silver Spring for the ClimateWatch Editorial Workshop — an opportunity to develop methods for crafting stories, overview articles, case studies, and other content that illustrate NOAA’s climate science expertise and services.
Representatives from science-technology centers, museums, and tribal communities from around the country also came to share their own techniques and traditions of storytelling, as well as to learn new ways to generate narrative content for their own projects.
Talking About Climate in More Ways Than One
The ClimateWatch workshop was held in preparation for the launch of NOAA’s new online Climate Services Portal expected later this year. The portal will use storytelling techniques to render climate information more accessible to the public and others in need of accurate and engaging climate data.
Included in the portal rollout will be an online magazine called ClimateWatch. The magazine will serve as a source of cogent, visually compelling climate stories from NOAA and its partners.
“Storytelling provides an excellent vehicle by which NOAA can build awareness, attentiveness and engagement with larger numbers of citizens,” said David Herring, communication director for the Climate Program Office. “The stories we came up with at the workshop and the stories that will be featured in ClimateWatch are going to be about NOAA people — their passion for science and their sense of wonder about how the climate system works.”
Andy Goodman, a nationally recognized storyteller, author, speaker and consultant was one of the workshop’s keynote speakers. Goodman, who was enlisted by former Vice President Al Gore in 2007 to train volunteers about global warming, told “the story of story,” which included simple steps for showcasing NOAA’s climate science and services in both print and oral presentations.
“Storytelling is an integral part of our history,” Goodman said. “We’ve been telling stories for tens of thousands of years.”
Climate Stories: Making the Case for Why We Should Care
When writing stories for the public, Goodman urged communicators to abandon the “inverted pyramid” (news summary) style of writing that they might have learned in journalism classes and replace it with engaging narratives. A good story, he said, requires a central character with a goal in mind and usually includes an “inciting incident” that throws the character’s world out of balance until he/she can come to some kind of resolution.
Stories structured like this are effective, Goodman added, because the audience begins to root for and empathize with the character. At the story’s conclusion, the audience will be more likely to remember and internalize the story’s meaning — in terms of climate change, storytelling is a powerful way to galvanize people to help the planet.
Tribal community leader and professor Dan Wildcat also took workshop attendees through a few stories of his own, both virtually and verbally. First they traveled together through time and space in an immersive visual presentation about the Lakota tribe’s age-old dependence on the Earth and solar system — with the aid of a 9-foot “GeoDome” visual projector.
Wildcat then shared a number of inspiring narratives orally passed down through generations of Native Americans, including those from his own experience teaching at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., where he is co-director of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Center.
Climate Portal to Boost News You Can Use
One well-known workshop attendee, TV weatherman Joe Witte, is eager to use the Climate Services Portal resources in his work for News Channel 8, a local cable news network serving the Washington, D.C., area.
“[NOAA’s ClimateWatch workshop] has got me thinking in new ways now about climate,” Witte said.
The ClimateWatch workshop was sponsored by the NOAA Central Region Collaboration Team, through a mini-grant from the NOAA Executive Committee on Engagement and was hosted by NOAA's OAR, Climate Program Office, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society.
Presentations from the ClimateWatch workshop are available on the Climate Program Office web site [www.climate.noaa.gov]. To learn more about the Climate Services Portal and ClimateWatch magazine, contact OAR’s David Herring at David.Herring@noaa.gov.