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The language of the climate crisis has escalated as the emergency has become more widely understood. Indeed, there are many studying the severity and development of climate change who who have pressed for more powerful language to be used in communicating it. Here, I used “climate crisis” in the opening sentence, a formulation preferred by some to the perhaps more passive “climate change” in the second sentence, which can be seen as excusing the role of humans in creating the situation we all now face.
But is ramping up the terminology really helpful as we seek to demonstrate the scale of the challenge and encourage widespread action? It turns out, that in the US at least, it may be counterproductive. New research indicates that familiar terms, such as climate change and global warming – did at least as well, and sometimes better, than climate crisis and climate emergency in eliciting concern, perceived urgency and willingness to act.
On August 12 1949, the representatives of 60 countries gathered in Geneva to ratify a series of agreements they had spent months hammering out in the aftermath of the horrors of the second world war. The Geneva Conventions were essentially the rules of armed conflict and were designed to set baselines for the conduct of militaries in their treatment of combatants and prisoners of war.
Much of what was achieved was an update on agreements signed in 1929 and honoured, by some countries at least, in the second world war. But what was new was that the 1949 conventions also sought to protect noncombatants. The second world war had seen the murder and mistreatment of so many civilians that the 1949 agreements expressly set out to put in place a series of protections, the violations of which would be war crimes.
As Marnie Lloyd, a specialist in international law and the laws of conflict at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand observes, they are “routinely violated everywhere”. With an estimated 120 armed conflicts raging around the world and ever more sophisticated and devastating technology for killing, she asks: are the conventions still fit for purpose?
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