Climate change communications & young people in the Kingdom: A reception study

Based on focus groups with young people in England and Scotland and in-depth interviews with journalists, communication professionals and campaigners, this article examines how UK youths perceive climate change issues and how they receive climate messages from the news media and other communication forms. We found a strong sense of pessimism and disempowerment among our participants and identified a set of ‘triple-R reasons’ for their disengagement and inaction – namely the lack of relevance, resources and rituals. In that context, the media and other major communication forms have tended to hinder rather than help our young participants to be more actively involved and engaged – due mainly to the lack of positive and relevant messages and the focus on the extreme and the controversial.