Why communications is dominating London Climate Action Week and the 8 sessions to watch

Here is a number worth sitting with: of the 300+ events at London Climate Action Week next week, 87 are about communications. It’s the third hottest topic, after finance and nature.

Not policy. Not technology. How we tell the story.

As communicators working in this sector since day-dot, that got us excited. It also got us asking why.

Has the sector hit a wall?

The honest answer may be that climate communications has reached a reckoning. After decades of science-led, urgency-driven messaging, the gap between what the evidence demands and how people are actually engaging with climate hasn’t closed in the way anyone hoped. More data, more reports, more targets, more campaigns and still a significant proportion of the public feels overwhelmed, disengaged or actively resistant.

This is a communications problem. And the sector is finally naming it.

Telling people how bad it is, often enough, with enough authority, hasn’t worked. At least not at the scale or speed required. Fear and doom, while attention-grabbing in the short term, tend to produce anxiety and paralysis rather than sustained behaviour change. People switch off. They feel the problem is too big, too distant or too far beyond their individual control to engage with meaningfully.

There is also a deeper problem of audience. Climate communications has, historically, spoken fluently to a relatively small and already-engaged community; urban, educated, progressive. In working-class communities, in rural areas, in the majority of the world that does not attend climate conferences or follow sustainability podcasts, the message hasn’t landed. Sometimes it has actively antagonised. 

And then there is the question of language. Should we even be saying ‘climate’? Is ‘sustainability’ diluted, at risk of becoming meaningless? For audiences already primed to receive it, the word works as a shorthand for everything that matters. For others, it has become associated with a politics they distrust, a class they resent, or a set of demands they feel aren’t made with their lives in mind. Reframing isn’t about softening the message. It is about finding the door that is actually open. Enter energy security, clean air, cost of living, community resilience, health.

Are the pressures sharper than ever?

2026 is a particularly acute moment. The political backlash against climate action in several major economies has put them on the defensive. Greenwash accusations have made businesses nervous about saying anything at all. Social media has made it easier to spread scepticism and harder to have a nuanced conversation. And the communities most exposed to climate risk are often the ones least reached by the communications coming out of the sector.

These are not abstract challenges. They are showing up in sessions across the LCAW programme next week in rooms focused on climate backlash, on reaching working-class communities, on how journalists cover a slow-moving emergency in a media environment built for speed, on how to communicate amidst the chaos.

The creatives have joined the movement.

Perhaps the most significant shift driving the plethora of communications sessions and events at LCAW this year, is a recognition that has taken the sector a long time to arrive at: you don’t win the argument in a policy paper. You win it in culture.

Science changes what we know about. Culture changes what we care about.

Make it human. Make it local. Make it irresistible. Stop asking people to sacrifice and start making the alternative more attractive than the status quo. Put the best communicators and the best creatives in service of the planet (and throw the best party while you’re at it).

Culture is where values are formed. Where identity is shaped. Where people decide, what matters and what doesn’t, who matters and who doesn’t, what’s cool and what’s not. If climate doesn’t live in culture, it will always remain the concern of a minority, however passionately held.

This is why some of the most interesting work in the space right now isn’t happening in comms agencies or campaign groups. It’s happening in music. In theatre. In art. In the spaces where subcultures form and spread and where ideas cross from the engaged few into the broader many… EarthPercent, Murmur, Purpose Disruptors, Youth Movements, Creatives for Climate, Wellcome Collection, The National Theatre.

8 Communications sessions to watch this week

• Video Storytelling: How to make your climate impact impossible to ignore Monday 22nd June
• Reporting Climate Change: A Gathering for Journalists, Editors and Communicators Monday 22nd June
• Harnessing AI for Action in Sustainability Tuesday 23rd June
• The Big Climate Narrative Debate Tuesday 23rd June
• Working Class Heroes. Climate storytelling beyond the stereotype Tuesday 23rd June
• Collective Creativity as Catalyst – With Wellcome Wednesday 24th June
• On Fire and Under Fire: Climate Backlash and Winning with Working-Class Communities Friday 26th June
• The Revolution will not be televised Friday June 26th

The conclusion

Something more hopeful is happening. Something solutions-focused, optimistic, fun. The F*ck Doom Party nods at this, as does the Blue Earth Opening Night (it will be noisy). The message is in the method.

So 87 events on communications is not a coincidence or a trend. It is the sector reckoning with something it has known for a while but is only now really confronting: that changing the story is part of changing the world.

We’ve been doing this for a long time.

At Greenhouse, we were working on this before it was a sector, before it was a boardroom priority, before it was a communications challenge that everyone was suddenly trying to solve.

Over the years we’ve helped some of the earliest and most trusted organisations in the climate and sustainability space find their voice, and make it land.

If you are wrestling with how to tell your climate story, whether you are preparing for COP31, navigating nature-related disclosures, trying to reach new audiences or simply working out what you should and shouldn’t be saying right now get in touch.

Find us at LCAW this week, or get in touch