The largest civilian evacuation the country has seen outside of wartime.

One hopeful note is the relief mixed with grief: strangers opening their homes to others, offering assistance, transportation, or meals to people who have had to leave theirs.

An app among others, Gironde Entraide, built almost overnight with OpenStreetMap and AI, did what official channels alone couldn't reach fast enough: organising solidarity.

We are definitely the ones we were waiting for.

Caroline - 6 August 2026

—————————————

1 . The Library is open

This edition's pick: Re.Climate Resource Library. 

Re.Climate is a Canadian organisation that brings practitioners and researchers together. They offer high-quality resources helping climate communicators “make their voices heard”. Whether it’s a misinformation report like the “Flame Wars - Misinformation and wildfire in Canada’s climate conversation”, or a segmentation tip sheet about the “Five Canadas”, they make sure to build capacity and drive action. 

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

• COMMUNICATIONS: Communicating Climate Change: A Practitioner's Guide - CDKN (2019)

  • This handbook is aimed at communications staff and “other champions of climate action” working on climate change in low- and middle-income countries. Organized around six practical themes, it also contains 30 case studies that center affected communities, enabling them to control their own narratives rather than be spoken for.

    
    

• MOBILISATION: Social Normalisation: Using Marketing to Make Green Normal, Journal of Consumer Behaviour (2014) 

  • The evidence indicates that green marketing has underperformed not because consumers lack environmental concern, but because it positions sustainable products and behaviours as a niche “green” category rather than as normal, mainstream behaviour. A must-read.

    
    

• NARRATIVE: The Global South and Climate Coverage: From News Taker to News Maker, Social Media + Society (2023)

  • How climate change is discussed has remained uniform and shaped by Global North media markets and international institutions: a dynamic in which the Global South has acted more as a news “taker” than a news “maker. A shift happened around Pakistan's 2022 floods, with "loss and damage" at COP27 as a reversal of the historical pattern.

    
    

• PSYCHOLOGY: Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance, Psychological Review (2010)

  • Construal-Level Theory proposes that people relate to anything not directly present — the future, the past, other places, other people, and hypothetical alternatives — through a single underlying mechanism: psychological distance. They do so by forming abstract mental construals of distal objects. Its relevance to climate communication is direct. Read more

    
    

• PUBLIC OPINION: Americans Experience a False Social Reality, Nature Communications (2022)

  • This study documents a striking case of "pluralistic ignorance" around US climate policy. It shows that supermajority support for climate concern and climate policy (66–80%) is almost universally underestimated, with the average American guessing the true level to be roughly half that (37–43%), a "false social reality" with people believing support is a minority position when it is in fact a strong majority one.

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

The Meliore “Director of Tech Innovation” posting is a very good signal. Placing AI at director level, tied to Operations and Network Support rather than IT, tells you something about where the foundation's thinking — and its work streams — are headed.

Familiarity with digital governance and AI ethics both appear in the listing. Meliore seeks a "technology leader who can translate emerging tech into high-impact strategies for global strategic communications". If that's your world, the deadline to apply is 12 August.

4 . Closing with beauty

I came across this beautiful picture...

It is from the queer designer and artist duo Mirat Masson, and consists of message lettering on English earthenware plates, created for the group exhibition ‘Plates & Creuses’ at the Hyperbien gallery (Montreuil, France). 

Their words from ReadyMag: “We wanted to keep a humorous tone while conveying political, queer, and feminist messages, without forgetting the material onto which these words were transferred”.

As a climate communicator, especially with years-long experience, I often feel like we tried everything, on every channel… Being fun, being harsh, cartoons, banners, YouTube. 

But plates?! Now I know how to talk about climate with my historically a bit conservative, pottery or gourmet friends :) 

——

Want to stay ahead of the curve? Join the Reading List.

Fortnightly, I’ll share short explainers, key findings, and data points from selected reports as they go live, plus exclusive content.