Lunchtime webinar: Climate Communication and the Railways

Description

Listen in to this free webinar from rail engineer Jenny Cooke telling stories from her own experience about how climate change is affecting the UK rail network and exploring how we can communicate climate risks and solutions to a wider audience.
Register online here: https://www.ice.org.uk/events/lunch-and-learn-talking-climate

From higher wind speeds and heatwaves to flooding, climate change is already affecting every part of our infrastructure. Rail workers need to be able to articulate how climate risks will affect clients, funders and the public, but it can be hard to get the message across. That means we need to learn to communicate differently, so that we can have informed public debate to find solutions.

This talk will summarise recent research published by Climate Outreach (http://climateoutreach.org) and apply it to the problem of how engineers can most effectively communicate climate impacts on infrastructure to the public covering the following topics:

Breaking the silence – the psychological barriers which explain why it is often so difficult to talk about climate change and to create lasting changes in behaviour.
Communication skills – how framing affects what the public hear and how they respond. Some frames work much better than others.
Explaining uncertainty and risk to people unfamiliar with statistics and probability.
Climate visuals – how to choose images which resonate to communicate climate change issues and solutions.
How to communicate across the political spectrum and understand what different people value to frame the infrastructure debate in a way which resonates with right-wing politicians.

Lunch and Learn: ICE’s Friday Lunch and Learn series is an exciting and varied programme of free talks delivered online. Learn something in your lunch hour and hear engineering experts present their approaches to solving a range of significant challenges facing our world today, from water supplies to railways.
(Photo caption: Floods surround the East Coast Mainline at Preston le Skerne during the November 2012 floods © Network Rail)