Climate Conversations meeting

18th July 2022

Sheffield Green Party hosted a presentation and workshop with Sheffield Climate Communications Hub volunteer Lauren Jones on having climate conversations

Why we need to get people talking about Climate Change: Only politicians can pass legislation; Politicians can't impose sustainability on an unwilling population - they need a 'social mandate'; Politicians won't prioritise an issue until their constituents tell them they care about it; To care about climate change people need to think and talk about it
The presentation covered why we need to get people talking about climate change!

Technology, policies, and laws are necessary for tackling climate change but these won’t work without the buy-in of ordinary people. A key way of making this happen is to talk about climate change in enjoyable ways that engage people as equal human beings. Lauren spoke about the ‘barstool’ climate conversations project, which is running in Sheffield and that anyone can do – you don’t even need a barstool 🙂

We discussed how we could have these conversations with family, friends or strangers – and how climate conversations with people we know can be harder than conversations with people we don’t! We practiced having REAL, open, non-judgemental conversations:

  • Respect your conversation your conversation partner
  • Enjoy the conversation
  • Ask questions
  • Listen, and show you’ve heard (or, Learn from the from the conversation)

You can click here to see the full presentation in PDF format and you can also access the role playing scenarios on a Google Doc here.

If you want to get in touch with the hub about doing barstool conversations, or any other aspect of their work, then email climatecommunicationshub@outlook.com