Evidence-Based Recommendations for Communicating the Impacts of Climate Change on Health

What the evidence shows

This is a synthesis commentary, not a primary study: the authors distill existing communication and behavioral science research — much of it developed and tested in tobacco control, cancer screening, and COVID-19 contexts — into 11 evidence-based recommendations for communicating about climate change's health impacts specifically. The piece opens by drawing lessons from COVID-19 communication (the value of trusted messengers, the tension between top-down and bottom-up behavior-change strategies) before applying that logic to climate-health messaging.

The scope is broad and practitioner-facing: intended for healthcare professionals, policymakers, and communicators (not just climate specialists) working at the intersection of health and climate. Each recommendation is grounded in cited empirical research from adjacent fields — persuasion science, risk communication, narrative transportation theory, numeracy research — and then extrapolated to the climate-health context, with the authors explicit that direct climate-health testing of many of these mechanisms is still lacking.

The approach is expert consensus rather than meta-analysis or systematic review: the authors selected and organized existing evidence into a practical framework (Box 1's 11 recommendations) rather than conducting new statistical synthesis.

Key Findings

• Communications from trusted, nonpartisan sources (e.g., primary care physicians, or surprising messengers like military leaders) outperform messages from expected sources like climate scientists, whose messages have shown null or even negative effects on public perception in some experiments.

• Framing climate change around near-term health benefits (e.g., cleaner air from a fossil fuel transition) increases perceived harm of fossil fuels and consumer advocacy intentions more effectively than economic, national security, or moral framing — and resonates especially with politically moderate and conservative audiences.

• Providing numeric statistics (vs. vague verbal descriptors) measurably shifts understanding and behavior: in one cited drug-risk study, participants given percentages judged risk more accurately and were more willing to follow recommendations than those given qualitative descriptions like "common."

• Visual images outperform text in attention capture, emotional intensity, memorability, and behavior change — but poorly chosen images (abstract, distal, or decontextualized) can backfire by making climate change feel less personally relevant.

Stand out data points

• ~33%: share of American adults classified as innumerate, a structural constraint on statistics-based messaging (OECD Skills Outlook 2013, cited secondhand).

• Qualitative: military-leader messengers on climate-health topics were more persuasive than climate scientists in an experimental study — attributed to the element of surprise from an unexpected source.

• Qualitative: fear appeals show "limited success... by themselves but are more successful when combined with action plans" that build people's confidence in their ability to act.

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Accessibility Strong fit. Reward everyday language and avoid coded words ("crisis", "green") that shrink the audience, with the caveat that this is based on six Western samples.

• Clarity Supports flagging vague verbal risk descriptors ("common," "rare") in favor of concrete numeric or frequency-based framing when statistics are used.

• Credibility Informs scoring of messenger choice — nonpartisan, trusted, sometimes non-obvious messengers (e.g., healthcare professionals) score higher than default "expert" messengers.

• Emotional Resonance Grounds guidance on using affect deliberately — as information, spotlight, or motivator — while pairing negative emotion with concrete action plans rather than fear alone.

• Autonomy The paper's own framing of bottom-up strategies as ones that "emphasize autonomy" is directly relevant to Understories' human-in-the-loop philosophy.

• Justice The report names structural racism and health inequities as context (e.g., disproportionate impacts on Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities, and lower trust in healthcare professionals among some of these groups due to histories of discrimination) but does not deeply investigate messaging strategies tailored to these communities. All cited empirical studies and all eight authors are US-based; Understories should flag this report's recommendations as needing adaptation for non-US and Global South contexts.

— non-exhaustive.

Key quote

On why bottom-up strategies matter despite being slower: bottom-up approaches "tend to emphasize autonomy—people feeling like they originate and control their own behaviors—and are key because they can empower individuals and lead to more effective and lasting behavior change."

© Society of Behavioral Medicine 2022 — All rights reserved.

Last update: 6 October 2026

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