For millions of people around the world, climate change is reaching emergency levels. Environmental disasters—including fires, floods, and extreme weather—wreak havoc on ecosystems, displace communities, and amplify geopolitical strife. The populations most vulnerable to these climate change-related disasters are often the low-income and marginalized communities least equipped to adapt and recover.

At the same time, many of these communities still contend with ever-present, existential problems unrelated to climate change—in many cases, the same problems that make it harder to adapt to and recover from climate-related disasters. For those communities, these challenges can make climate change feel secondary or even abstract—a problem for the wealthy and for academics. In their context, the term “crisis” falls flat.

I know because I am from one of those communities.

Long before I was a technologist or started working in climate, I grew up in a mostly rural area of Oklahoma that has experienced significant economic decline. From a young age, I watched people, including neighbors, friends, and family, regularly endure life-changing crises—serious work-related injury, chronic illness, unaffordable medical care, drug addiction, lost homes. I’ve known countless families who were forced to make excruciating choices between basic necessities—choices that often tore those families apart. In the largest city in Pittsburg County—where I grew up—residents don’t even have reliable access to potable tap water. When struggling to meet basic needs and survive, even certain future dangers do not feel like a crisis.

As a young adult, I witnessed new kinds of crises while serving overseas in the U.S. Army: the atrocities of war and human suffering on a scale that belies my ability to describe them. Individuals in conflict-prone regions are under a constant threat of starvation, displacement, death, dismemberment, and myriad other horrors that humans are capable of inflicting on one another. Since returning home, I’ve seen my fellow veterans struggle with the physical and mental aftereffects of their time spent in this environment. Those struggles are horrendous, but they pale in comparison with ongoing challenges that face the peoples who still inhabit the regions from which we have withdrawn our troops.

My experiences as a member of these communities have given me deep empathy for the consequential, profound crises they face—both those related to climate change and those wholly separate from it. It has also given me valuable insights about how they perceive climate change and the rhetoric around it—and how we can have more effective conversations about the future of our planet.

LOWER THE TEMPERATURE OF CLIMATE RHETORIC

I’ve found in conversations with friends and family in Oklahoma and elsewhere, there is a more effective framing for climate change than calling it a “crisis” or “emergency.”

Climate change in many ways is analogous to a chronic disease—the kind with flare-ups that slowly worsen with time and lack of treatment. At first, symptoms might be barely noticeable. Even when they become evident, ignoring them may still be easier than addressing them. But when left untreated, the symptoms of the disease worsen, degrade quality of life, and ultimately become life-threatening.

The good news is there are many ways to “treat” climate change. The bad news is that for people in the communities most vulnerable to its impacts, the treatment options proffered by experts—eat less meat, use less electricity, buy a smaller car, stop drilling for oil—are often impractical. Talking about climate change as a condition with many treatment options, including many that have positive outcomes and co-benefits for these communities that extend beyond climate, can be effective in reframing the conversation.

COMMUNICATE OPPORTUNITIES, NOT SACRIFICES

The reality is that the people who can be persuaded by talking about the imminent and dire consequences of climate change have already been persuaded. You don’t need to belabor to farmers and ranchers that droughts, excessive heat, and severe weather are bad. But, if you can point them towards affordable, effective climate actions that will protect their livelihood, increase food security, provide good paying jobs, and stabilize prices, they’ll listen. We need to turn our efforts towards explaining the benefits and incentives of taking action.

This includes helping people understand how effective climate legislation, especially at the local level, can address the factors that are driving climate change while also directly helping families and communities overcome the other structural challenges they face.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, clean energy jobs grew 3.9% in 2022, adding 114,000 jobs nationally. Clean energy jobs now account for over 40% of total energy jobs. And new technologies aimed at mitigating climate change—like direct air capture—leverage many of the same skill sets as jobs in the oil and gas industry.

At the same time, clean energy and carbon projects—from reforestation to landscape management to direct air capture—can deliver numerous co-benefits for local communities, including greater agricultural productivity, better drought and fire resistance, and new job opportunities.

PARTING THOUGHTS

Mine is not a unique lived experience. From Oklahoma to Afghanistan, communities are experiencing crises that are visceral, urgent, and all-consuming. Hunger, injury, disability, poverty, and death are threats they face regularly. These things are often unrelated to climate, and can feel far more tangible than the slow march of climate change.

When we double down on sensationalism when it is already failing, we deepen divides instead of bridging gaps. Explaining how communities will benefit in the near term, listening to their side of the story without discounting their experiences (especially when they’re skeptical), and addressing their concerns is essential. We will only solve the challenges of a changing climate through partnership and collaboration. That requires us to adopt a much more nuanced, disciplined, and measured approach to communicating about it.