1 Reorienting climate change communication for effective mitigation – forcing people to be green or fostering grass-roots engagement? David Ockwell 1,2 , Lorraine Whitmarsh 1,3 and Saffron O’Neill 1,3 1 Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research; 2 Sussex Energy Group, SPRU, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; 3 School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Introduction With roughly 50% of many nations’ carbon emissions coming from private travel and domestic energy use 1 , governments across the globe recognise the urgent need to encourage individuals to adopt low carbon lifestyles. Whilst individuals represent the lowest common denominator in terms of communicating this need, these individuals also constitute the workforce of businesses and government; implying possible knock-on effects in the work place from personal engagement with climate change. The urgency of this issue was reinforced last year by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) review of the most up to date science on climate change. The UK’s Climate Change Bill has set an ambitious target of a 60% reduction in emissions by 2050, yet some commentators see this as inadequate relative to the IPCC’s findings. To date government efforts to effect low carbon behaviour change have principally focussed on expensive communication campaigns in an attempt to foster greener attitudes amongst the public. But research suggests that encouraging attitudinal change alone is unlikely to be effective. What is required is full public engagement with climate change. We define engagement as having three key components: understanding (knowledge), emotion (interest and concern) and behaviour (action). In this paper we outline some important barriers to public engagement with climate change. We then discuss how these might be overcome via legislation that attempts to force green behaviour and what the barriers to such legislation are. We also highlight the tensions between such top-down, behaviour-forcing approaches and bottom-up, participatory approaches that might offer a more grassroots, socially empowering approach to mitigating emissions. As outlined in a recent Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) report, decisions about top-down versus bottom-up approaches for climate change policy go to the heart of our beliefs about the boundaries of public and private, the limits of state control, and the rational behaviour of individuals. This could, at the extreme, be characterised as a case of democracy vs. benign dictatorship. By drawing on the latest climate change communication research, we explore whether these ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ perspectives on societal engagement in mitigation efforts can be reconciled. We argue for a middle way for communication that recognises two crucial, but distinct, roles that communication could play in engaging the public in low carbon lifestyles: firstly, to facilitate public acceptance of regulation; and secondly, to stimulate grass-roots action through emotional and rational engagement with climate change. 1 The figure in the UK in 2002 was 51% including personal transport (DTI, 2002. Energy Consumption in the United Kingdom. Department for Trade and Industry, London. www.dti.gov.uk/files/file11250.pdf )    