I'm writing this from Europe, which went through its third heatwave. In the Netherlands, the government reported almost 500 excess deaths from the heat, mostly among elderly people living alone.

Caroline - 9 July 2026

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1 . The Library is open

Understories evaluates your message against 50+ peer-reviewed studies, grounded in a Library organised across five categories: Communications, Mobilisation, Narrative, Psychology and Public Opinion.

I'll use this space to point you to other libraries and curated collections worth knowing. This edition's pick:  EnvironmentGPT, UNEP's first public-beta chatbot for environmental science. It draws on a curated set of 220+ UNEP publications to give cited, plain-language answers on environmental topics — a different scale of operation than Understories, but a useful reference point. Worth a look if you work with this kind of material often.

2. Five new reports in the Library, and what they found

• COMMUNICATIONS: Communicating Statistics on the Health Effects of Climate Change, Ellen Peters, Renee N. Salas (2022)

  • A finding: Framing changes what a statistic does, even when the underlying data doesn't move. Telling people that climate change accounts for 37% of warm-season heat deaths (a static share) lands very differently than telling them heat-related deaths have risen 59% because of climate change (a dynamic change). The authors found the second version more comprehensible and more motivating — worth testing the next time you're choosing how to present a number. Read more.

  
  

• MOBILISATION: Free Riding in Climate Protests, Johannes Jarke-Neuert, Henrike Schwickert (2022)

  • A finding: A genuinely surprising result: people are less likely to join a protest when they expect a bigger crowd. Participation behaves as a strategic substitute, not a complement — the opposite of what the researchers themselves had pre-registered as their hypothesis. If your mobilisation messaging leans on "everyone's coming," this one's worth sitting with. Learn from it.

  
  

• NARRATIVE: Common Destination: Reframing Aviation to Ensure a Safe Landing Stay Grounded and New Weather Institute (2022)

  • A finding: The aviation industry has framed the debate on its own terms so successfully that campaigners who argue within that framing are already fighting on rigged ground. The report's case: escape the frame, don't debate inside it. Access the handbook.

  
  

• PSYCHOLOGY: Appealing to Fear: A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeal Effectiveness and Theories, Melanie B. Tannenbaum, Justin Hepler, and al. (2015)

  • A finding: Across 248 independent samples, fear appeals produced a consistent, significant positive effect on attitudes, intentions, and behaviour. The evidence against using fear is weaker than most communicators assume — the nuance is in how, not whether. Link here.

  
  

• PUBLIC OPINION: The Peoples' Climate Vote 2024, UNDP and the University of Oxford Department of Sociology (2024)

  • A finding: Climate change is already a daily-life variable, not an abstract concern: 69% of people globally say it affects major life decisions — where they live, work, what they buy — rising to 74% in Least Developed Countries and 80% in Small Island Developing States. The gap between "concern" and "already deciding differently" is smaller than most messaging assumes. Read more.

  
  

3 . A link on AI & [climate] comms worth watching

From Noahpinion on Substack. "Pizza wheels are bad, Japanese toilets are great. So why do Americans use the former and not the latter?" Not the title I expected for a piece about AI — but that's what it is.

Noah Smith describes a party in Washington, D.C., where the educated progressives he spoke with were uniformly dismissive of artificial intelligence. Citing Sybren Kooistra's phrase for it — progressives' "unilateral disarmament" on the technology of the future — Smith gets at something underneath the dismissal: AI unsettles existing power dynamics, and that's closer to the real objection than the stated one. Worth your ten minutes. Read more.

4 . Closing with beauty

I came across this beautiful picture...

The caption: "The print is called Gyeoul (겨울) and is inspired by the ritual of sharing food as a balm in the colder months. Winter citrus like pomelo and clementines that I peel for my children, and scallion, ginger, garlic, and enoki mushrooms — aromatics for homemade soups and jjigaes — remind me of the many ways we can help nourish one another." 

It's by the artist Erin Jang @TheIndigoBunting, made in support of @heartofdinner, which nourishes Asian American elders in under-resourced New York communities. Winter will follow this heatwave soon enough. Looking after each other doesn't go out of season.

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