Narrating Climate Change: speculative data stories in comic form for affecting climate action

Climate change is difficult to rationalize due to it being remote in both its effects and in where it operates. Using purely physical arguments like statistics and policy debates cannot persuade people to the side of climate change action, because explicit mandates don’t align people’s own intrinsic motives with those of climate action. Instead, narratives and visual communication can influence viewers implicitly by the way they show and reinforce actions and ways of thinking that align with climate action. In this study we created comics designed on the human level to promote ideas like future-based thinking, sharing of responsibility, and caring for each other, as well as data visualizations that illustrate future consequences of climate change for the purpose of averting negative alternative realities. We test these strategies on readers unfamiliar with the theme of the stories, reading them as common manga about characters and situations. We then surveyed these readers to find that data stories can affect the way they interpret narratives to align with pro-climate attitudes such as sharing and future-vision, and that readers are focused on the human-level of the data and story as opposed to the physical resource level. Thus speculative data provides a way to influence individuals’ climate change attitudes by showing alternative realities and positive attributes of collective responsibility and planning-for-the-future in data story form.