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authority engagement with civil society, rather than just being categorised as ‘environment’, which is often the case. A recognition of climate change as cross-cutting would also lead government to engage with a wider variety of stakeholders about it and help to build conviction among civil society organisations that the issue is of shared importance.
“The department for education has a key role in terms of children’s policy and I’ve often advocated that we need to link it up with sustainable living agenda and climate change. But there’s also a need to help policy makers understand the issues and their links.”– NCB
Related to this was the point that the lack of visible responses to climate change makes it harder for organisations to demonstrate the relevance of tackling it to people’s daily lives. Pushing government to make its efforts to tackle climate change more visible to members of the public is a key message of Green Alliance’s work on inspiring public engagement with the transition to a low carbon society.8 It is also relevant to civil society organisations being able to demonstrate the relevance of climate change to stakeholders.
“A real barrier is a lack of visible, concrete responses to climate change. Our world doesn’t look like one that has responded to the challenges of climate change. Seeing is believing, so if people see all the benefits that go with tackling climate change they will be more motivated.” – Co-operatives UK “If your local community centre is having a massive retrofit to make itself more energy efficient that has a big impact on people.” – CDF
5.4 Getting the language right “It’s important for us to talk about these issues in our own distinct voice, and to echo the concerns of our supporters and members.” – National Trust
The strength of having diverse civil society groups active on climate change is their ability to engage the people and organisations they work with using language that resonates with them. Talking about ‘climate change’ is not the right approach to engaging or influencing many organisations and stakeholder groups. We highlight below the different sets of language identified through this study and its interviews. Their variety alone makes the case for getting the language right being a key success factor in engaging more groups with climate change. And it is equally important when it comes to advocacy. Efforts to influence decision makers are more likely to be successful when couched in the language and linked to the existing issues that they already work on with stakeholders.