On the difficulty in fearing well about climate change

Abstract

One common strategy in climate communication is to appeal to one's fear of the frightening consequences of climate change. One common concern, however, is that fear can be counterproductive as it tends to lead to disengagement. Proponents of fear appeals typically respond by emphasising the importance of pairing fear with an efficacious recommended action. In this paper, I argue that, in the context of climate change, it is difficult to find a recommended action that is sufficiently efficacious. I suggest that one way to overcome this challenge is to appeal to our fear of moral corruption, rather than the negative physical consequences of climate change. I further argue that motivating right actions should not be the only goal in climate communication. Instead, getting the audience to feel fitting emotional responses, including fitting fear, is another goal that we can justifiably adopt. Thus, the counterproductivity of fear does not always necessitate refraining from using fear appeals.

Keywords

fear climate change climate emotions climate communication fitting emotions

Introduction

Fear appeals are ‘persuasive messages that attempt to arouse fear by emphasising the potential danger and harm that will befall individuals if they do not adopt the messages’ recommendations’ (Tannenbaum et al., 2015: 1178). In the context of climate communication, fear appeals highlighting the dire consequences of climate change are frequently used (e.g., Milman et al., 2021; Newsome and Ripple, 2024; Wallace-Wells 2017), though they remain polarising. One famous and controversial example of fear appeal is ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ (2017), originally published in New York magazine by Wallace-Wells. In the article, he warns us about what our future could look like with climate change: unbearable heat, unbreathable air, famine, ancient diseases released from the thawing of Arctic Ice… Wallace-Wells assures us that, no matter how well-informed we are–‘It is, I promise, worse than you think.’ While some applaud Wallace-Wells’ attempt to scare us (Matthews, 2017), others worry that it is a problematic strategy. As Holthaus (2017) bluntly puts it: ‘The problem is, if you’re trying to motivate people, scaring the shit out of them is a really bad strategy.’

For critics of fear appeals in climate communication, one common worry is that fear appeals tend to lead to disengagement–that is, they tend to lead to avoidance or denial, instead of motivating people to take action. In response, defenders of fear appeals argue that we can resolve this issue by presenting the issue of climate change as threatening and recommending an efficacious response to control the threat.

In this article, I argue that, in the context of climate change, it is difficult to find a recommended action that is sufficiently efficacious. Actions that an individual is typically capable of taking are generally not efficacious enough to control the threat posed by climate change. Changes on an institutional or even global level are typically more efficacious in controlling the threat, but it is generally difficult for an individual to enact such changes. Thus, fear appeals are likely to lead to disengagement in the context of climate change, even when the fear they aim to elicit is fitting, in the sense that it accurately presents its object, the consequences of climate change, as dangerous.

Despite this, I argue that we should not abandon fear appeals in climate communication altogether. First, I propose that we may improve fear appeals in a different way by changing the object of fear from the dire consequences of climate change to moral corruption. This makes it easier to find a recommended response that is efficacious, since the efficacy depends on whether one's moral agency can be strengthened, rather than whether the consequences of climate change can be mitigated. Second, I argue that having fitting emotional responses to the world can constitute a kind of good in itself. When fear is fitting but counterproductive, we face a conflict between two kinds of good that are often incomparable. As such, we cannot simply conclude that the goal of motivating right actions should always be prioritised over the goal of cultivating fitting emotional responses.

The need to fear well

Despite the popularity of fear appeals in climate communication, various critiques have been raised over their usage. Among those, one common critique is that fear appeals tend to lead to disengagement in the context of climate change.¹ Such a critique can be found in several empirical studies. For example, Feinberg and Willer (2011) suggest that ‘dire messages’ about global warming make individuals deny or discount the existence of global warming. O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole (2009) conclude from their empirical studies that ‘shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change…clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial…’ (p. 375). These concerns are echoed in public discourse. According to Abraham (2017), people who take indefensible positions like climate change denial do so out of fear: they ‘cannot bear to look the problem honestly in the face’ and find it ‘easier to deny its existence.’ It follows that fear appeals can only reinforce such positions rather than change them. If fear appeals can lead to disengagement, they are not only unproductive in that they often fail to motivate sufficient actions, but they are also counterproductive in that they can discourage people from thinking about the issue, thus stopping them from taking climate action.

To understand why fear appeals can be counterproductive, it is helpful to consider the extended parallel process model (EPPM), which is frequently used in empirical research on fear appeals. ² According to the EPPM, fear appeals can give rise to three different outcomes: the recipient might ignore the fear appeal, be motivated to control the threat, or be motivated to control their fear (Witte and Allen, 2000). The recipient of a fear appeal first appraises the threat posed by the issue. If the threat is appraised to be low, ‘then there is no motivation to process the message further, and people simply ignore the fear appeal’ (p. 594). In other words, if the threat is appraised to be low, the fear appeal has largely failed to elicit fear in the audience. If the threat is appraised to be high, the recipient is then motivated to begin the second appraisal, which concerns the efficacy of the recommended response. When the recommended response is perceived to be high in efficacy, the recipient becomes ‘motivated to control the danger and consciously think about ways to remove or lessen the threat.’ In contrast, when the recommended response is perceived to lack efficacy, the recipient is ‘motivated to control their fear (because they believe it's futile to control the danger) and focus on eliminating their fear…’ The attempt to eliminate fear can involve mechanisms like denial (‘it won’t happen to me’), defensive avoidance (‘I’m not going to think about it’), and reactance (‘they’re just trying to manipulate me, I’m going to ignore them’).

In the context of climate change, fear appeals typically highlight the threat posed by the negative physical consequences of climate change (e.g., bushfires).³ In these cases, the perceived efficacy of a recommended response refers to how effective the response is perceived to be in mitigating the negative consequences of climate change. The worry that fear appeals can be counterproductive arises in cases where the threat is appraised to be high, and the recommended response is appraised to lack efficacy. This is precisely why some fear appeals in climate communication have been criticised. Commenting on ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ by Wallace-Wells (2017), Atkin (2017) notes that the author offers very few solutions to the doomsday scenario:

After spending 6000 words on the worst-case scenario, Wallace-Wells devoted fewer than 1000 words to possible solutions…

In other words, ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ presents climate change as involving an extremely high level of threat, while failing to provide an efficacious response to the issue. According to the EPPM, such worries are largely justified: the article is likely to lead to disengagement instead of motivating the audience to take climate action.

Those who wish to defend fear appeals in climate communication are largely aware that fear appeals can sometimes be counterproductive. However, for them, this reveals a need to improve fear appeals, not a need to turn away from them. McQueen (2021), for example, argues that ‘there is nothing inherent about fear appeals that makes them vulnerable to standard moral criticisms’ (p. 161). Instead, McQueen suggests that we need to ‘fear well’ about climate change. Following the EPPM, one suggestion she makes is that we need to pair salience with efficacy-enhancing information when designing fear appeals about climate change (p. 160). A similar argument has been made by Ballet et al. (2023). They draw a distinction between intense and moderate fear, and favour the latter: unlike intense fear that ‘creates apathy, fatigue and resignation,’ moderate fear motivates us to take action’ (p. 18). This is because intense fear ‘leaves no room for rationality or hope,’ while moderate fear ‘opens a prospect of possible change, and therefore hope’ (p. 19). In other words, moderate fear, unlike intense fear, leaves open the possibility of an efficacious response to climate change. McQueen and Ballet et al. are right that fear appeals are not always counterproductive, and we should strive to make the audience fear well and moderately.⁴ However, we need to question whether this is a feasible task. As I am going to argue, it is difficult to fear well and moderately about the negative physical consequences of climate change, since it is difficult to find an efficacious recommended action.

The difficulty in fearing well

There are two kinds of efficacy when it comes to a recommended response in a fear appeal, namely, response-efficacy and self-efficacy. Response-efficacy concerns whether ‘performing the recommended actions will result in desirable consequences’ (Tannenbaum et al., 2015: 1180). Self-efficacy concerns whether the audience feels that ‘they are capable of performing the fear appeal's recommended actions.’ For example, as a response to climate change, for an individual, switching to a plant-based diet is typically more self-efficacious, but less response-efficacious, than getting the government to impose carbon taxes. For a recommended response to be efficacious, both kinds of efficacy matter. If a recommended response in a fear appeal is only efficacious in one sense but not the other, it is likely that the fear appeal will still lead to disengagement.

Yet, when it comes to climate change, it is often difficult for a recommended action to be efficacious in both senses. On one hand, solutions that are response-efficacious largely lack self-efficacy. Climate change is a collective-action problem that requires collective efforts from a large number of individuals to mitigate and resolve. In this regard, for a recommended action to be response-efficacious, it needs to have an impact on a sufficiently large number of individuals. Recommended actions that involve changes on an institutional level, such as imposing carbon taxes and subsidising renewable energy, are more response-efficacious than changes in an individual recipient's own lifestyle. Beyond policy changes, more systemic and radical changes may also be needed – in particular, some believe that we cannot avoid the serious consequences of climate change unless we move away from the free market and neoliberalism in general (Parr, 2012; Koch, 2012). Further, changes within one nation are likely not enough. Rather, efforts from multiple national governments are needed to successfully avert the threat posed by climate change. For an individual, however, it is often extremely difficult to see how one is capable of achieving these changes on an institutional, systemic, or even global level. Indeed, most of us are simply not in a position to effectively make such changes. For example, on a national level, one might vote for a political party that has better climate policy and influence others around them to do so. Yet, in most cases, the political influence of an individual is largely limited, and it is not very likely one's influence alone will get the party elected. In short, recommended actions that involve institutional and even global changes are response-efficacious but not self-efficacious, at least for the vast majority of the audience. This does not mean we have no reason to vote for a greener political party or act in other ways to bring about systemic changes. For example, as Maltais (2013) argues, we might have a moral duty to vote green because ‘its very small impact is a corollary of its very small cost to the voter’ (p. 602). Rather, the argument here is that fear appeals might not effectively motivate these actions due to their small impact.

On the other hand, solutions that are self-efficacious largely lack response-efficacy. Actions like switching to a plant-based diet can make a big difference if a large number of people perform them. Yet, changes in one individual's lifestyle, by themselves, are unlikely to make a big difference to the negative consequences of climate change. This is well-noted by philosophers who write on climate change (Johnson, 2003; Sinnott-Armstrong, 2010). Sinnott-Armstrong, for example, argues that an individual's decision to go on a joyride (to drive a gas-guzzling car for fun), by itself, makes no difference to the negative consequences of climate change. That is, even though the total amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has increased, the increase is so small compared to the overall amount that it does not make a difference to the harm (e.g., heat waves) caused by climate change. If this is the case, an individual's decision to refrain from joyrides is self-efficacious (one typically can choose not to go on a joyride), but has no response-efficacy because it does not make any difference to the negative consequences of climate change as portrayed in fear appeals.

We might be able to reject Sinnott-Armstrong's claim in three ways. First, one can argue that individual emissions do make some difference to the negative consequences of climate change. Perhaps the emissions from my joyrides make the consequences of climate change slightly worse, especially if we consider the joyrides that I might go on throughout my lifetime. The difference here can certainly be morally important. As Cullity (2020) estimates:

On average, each rich-world individual contributes only about one 2 billionth of the total emissions being added to the atmosphere globally. But the aggregate amount of harm that these emissions are projected to do is very large: it includes more than 500,000 deaths a year for more than 1000 years. So on these figures, the average contribution is more than a quarter of a death each. (p. 18)

Such considerations might support the view that an individual has a moral responsibility to reduce personal emissions through improving her lifestyle. However, they do not sufficiently boost the response-efficacy of such actions. Reducing the number of deaths from, say, 500,000,000 to 499,999,999 does not make the consequences of climate change any less frightening. Even if the changes in my lifestyle can reduce the amount of harm I cause or contribute to, the large picture–the frightening consequences of climate change – remains mostly unaltered.

Second, one might argue that at least some individual actions do make a significant difference. In her work, McKinnon (2014) looks at individual emissions in relation to what Kagan (2011) calls ‘triggering cases.’ In such cases, it is true that most acts do not make a difference, but ‘some single act makes a great deal of difference’:

It might be, for example, that a certain number of such acts can occur without any harmful effect whatsoever, but then a threshold point is reached, and a single further act triggers the harmful result (Kagan, 2011: 118).

McKinnon (2014) suggests that we can similarly think that the first several individual acts of emission do not make a difference (they do not cause any perceptible changes to the climate), but at some point, when the threshold of greenhouse gas is reached, ‘at least one individual emission made a perceptible difference and made climate change worse’ (p. 40). Following this, if I improve my lifestyle, I might make a big difference to the negative consequences of climate change, since one of my acts might just be the triggering act. The chance that my act is the triggering act is extremely low, considering the large global population. Given the serious consequences of climate change, such considerations might be strong enough for us to think that an individual has a moral duty to reduce personal emissions to avoid such a risk, or that it is rational for an individual to reduce emissions to avoid such a risk. Yet, they are still not strong enough for us to think that improving an individual's lifestyle, as a recommended response to climate change, is response-efficacious. Since the chance that my act is the triggering act is extremely low, the chance that the frightening consequences of climate change can be significantly improved by changes in my lifestyle alone is also extremely low.

Third, one might argue that individual choices can also have an effect on other individuals. As Hourdequin (2010) argues: ‘Part of what makes personal choices effective and morally important is that personal choices have a communicative and social function’ (p. 457). My choice of a plant-based diet, for example, can inspire others to follow suit. While the communicative and social function of my action might provide one with a moral duty to perform certain actions, it is still unlikely that such a function can sufficiently boost the response-efficacy of these actions. In the case of diet, for example, it is unlikely that my choice of a plant-based diet can influence enough individuals to make a substantial difference to the negative consequences of climate change as portrayed in fear appeals.

When it comes to fear appeals about climate change, it remains difficult for a recommended action to be response-efficacious and self-efficacious at the same time. This is likely the case with many modern environmental issues, such as air pollution from vehicle emissions, which are collective action problems that call for cooperation from a large number of individuals (both within a generation and between different generations). Here, it is helpful to compare fear appeals in climate communication with those in public health communication. Fear appeals are frequently used in public health issues. For example, cigarette packages in most countries now display health warnings about the potential consequences of smoking, which often include graphic images. Unlike in the context of climate change, the solutions proposed for issues like smoking can often be efficacious in both senses. They tend to have a high level of response-efficacy: the negative consequences associated with smoking can typically be effectively minimised if one smokes less or quits smoking. There is substantial evidence, that, for example, quitting smoking lowers one's risk of lung cancer (Ebbert et al., 2003). The solutions also tend to have higher levels of self-efficacy: we typically think that what we consume is, in most cases, within our control. At least, most of us think we have more control over our smoking habits than the environmental policy our government and other governments endorse. Following this, it might be easier for us to ‘fear well’ in the context of public health issues like smoking, compared to in the context of climate change.

Fear and hope

In response, one might argue that the success of fear appeals only relies on the recipient's perception of the efficacy of the recommended action, instead of its actual efficacy. Perhaps we just need to make the audience believe that the recommended action is efficacious in both senses, even though they are likely not. Viewed this way, one potential strategy for improving fear appeals is through Pettit's (2004) concept of substantial hope. Substantial hope involves ‘acting as if the desired prospect is going to obtain or has a good chance of obtaining,’ in order to avoid the danger of losing heart from having low confidence that the desired prospect will obtain (p. 163). For example, when the prospect of surviving an illness is low, acting as if one has a good chance of surviving can prevent the danger of giving up altogether. In the context of climate change, it is plausible that we need to act as if the recommended action is efficacious in both senses to avoid the danger of giving up on mitigating climate change. Along a similar line, McKinnon (2014) argues that we need hope in the context of climate change:

A person who…believes that the reductions in personal emissions she makes could make some difference, and that she could have the ability to make these reductions, is more likely to succeed in making the necessary changes to her lifestyle (p. 45).

However, there is a moral difference between an individual choosing to act as if her action is efficacious when it is not, and making another individual believe her action is efficacious when it is not. Pettit (2004) notes that there is no self-deception in hope: those who embrace hope can act as if the desired prospect will obtain in an open and honest manner. That is, they might be able to do so while ‘being prepared to admit to themselves and others that for very good, pragmatic reasons…they are refusing to expose themselves to the low or unstable tide of evidence…’ (p. 162). Regardless of whether one agrees with such a view, making another individual believe that her action is efficacious when it is not most certainly amount to deception. Even though such deception is arguably for a good cause (to motivate climate action) that is often in the deceived individual's own interest, the act of deception is still morally objectionable in itself. We should thus avoid using the tactic of deception to boost the efficiency of fear appeals, if we can achieve these goals through other strategies without deceiving the audience.

A different notion of hope that we may appeal to is radical hope, which involves ‘the idea that something good will emerge even if it outstrips my present limited capacity for understanding what that good is’ (Lear, 2006: 94). With radical hope, we can accept that we currently do not have a response to climate change that is both self-efficacious and response-efficacious, but we do not rule out the hope that the future can still be good. As Thompson (2010) suggests, even when we believe that not enough people will make the kind of change needed to mitigate climate change, ‘we must be actively committed, with a radical hope, to the belief that cultivating virtues of environmental activism will not be in vain…’ (p. 51). Appealing to radical hope, then, does not require deception.

Radical hope, however, can also undermine fear appeals. With radical hope, we are committed to the belief that the recommended action can be efficacious, even though we may struggle to see how this can be the case. Yet, this kind of reasoning can also lower one's appraisal of threat in fear appeals. Recall that, for fear appeals to be effective, the audience needs to appraise the threat as high in the first place. If we are committed to the belief that the future will be good despite existing evidence to the contrary, the same logic might also compel us to believe that the consequences of climate change, even with little mitigation, can be good despite existing evidence to the contrary. If this is the case, radical hope might lead us to appraise the threat of climate change as low, and thus ignore fear appeals.

We seem to face a dilemma when we use fear appeals in the context of climate change. On one hand, we need hope and optimistic messages to make the audience believe that the recommended action is efficacious. Without this, fear appeals can be counterproductive and lead to disengagement. On the other hand, hope and optimistic messages can also undermine fear appeals by leading to a lower appraisal of risk. In empirical research on hope, the worry that hope can lead to inaction is precisely linked to the reduced risk perception. Hornsey and Fielding (2016) observe that optimistic messages that highlighted the recent plateauing of carbon emission growth increased feelings of hope but weakened mitigation motivation. This is largely because these messages ‘reduced participants’ sense that climate change presented a risk’ (p. 32).

Changing the object of fear

So far, I’ve largely assumed that the threats presented in fear appeals in the context of climate change concern the physical consequences of climate change, such as bushfires. This is also the most conventional kind of fear appeals used in climate communication. However, climate change also presents other kinds of threats. One important but often overlooked threat is the threat to our moral agency. In this section, I will briefly explore the possibility of changing the object of fear to the threat to one's moral agency. I suggest that this might be a more productive way to appeal to fear in the context of climate change.

In Section 3, I noted that we may have various kinds of duties to perform actions such as voting and switching to a plant-based diet. These duties may arise from the positive (though small) impact of our actions, our influence on other individuals, as well as the cumulative effects of our choices over a long period of time. Such duties, however, are often difficult to fulfil in the context of climate change. As Gardiner (2006) observes, climate change makes us ‘extremely vulnerable to moral corruption’. That is, since it ‘involves a complex convergence of problems, it is easy to engage in manipulative or self-deceptive behaviour by applying one's attention selectively…’ (p. 408).

Recognising our moral duties while failing to act on them poses a threat to our moral agency—it represents a breakdown between our moral judgments and our actions. It is thus possible for us to appeal to fear toward such a threat in the context of climate change. What is portrayed as fearsome here is not only the difficulty of living up to our own moral standards, but also of being positive role models for those we care about, such as our children.

Such fear appeals, though unconventional, have the potential to overcome the challenge I raised in Section 3. In these fear appeals, individual climate actions, be it voting green or switching to a plant-based diet, can be response-efficacious. This is because, in virtue of performing such actions, we are effectively mitigating the threat of moral corruption by fulfilling certain moral duties. Importantly, this is the case even if such actions cannot make a substantial difference to the negative consequences of climate change. Such fear appeals depend on a specific kind of hope, the hope that one can still live a morally excellent life despite being vulnerable to moral corruption. They can thus work regardless of whether we are optimistic or pessimistic about the prospect of mitigating climate change. The salience of the threat to one's moral agency is not undermined by the hope that climate change can be mitigated or that ‘someday the good will return in a presently unimaginable form’ (Thompson, 2010: 50). Meanwhile, the hope for moral excellence may still be retained even if we have lost hope that climate change can be mitigated. For example, we may still be hopeful that we can live a morally excellent life by building communities and resilience.

One might object here that when we appeal to one's fear toward moral corruption, we are no longer appealing only to fear, but also to other emotions, such as guilt and shame about one's failure to fulfil certain duties. While this is certainly true, it points to the difficulty in fearing well about climate change if we only appeal to fear. Other than guilt and shame, a range of other emotions need to be considered, including positive emotions, such as love toward one's children, which can inspire one to become a role model for them.

Fitting fear and affective injustice

I have so far argued that the conventional kind of fear appeals in climate change, those highlighting the negative physical consequences of climate change, are likely to be counterproductive. While I have suggested that we can improve fear appeals by changing the object of fear, in this section, I will look at whether we should refrain from using fear appeals in the conventional way.

Note that fear toward the negative consequences of climate change, despite being counterproductive, is fitting. Fear is fitting when it accurately presents its object as dangerous (D’Arms and Jacobson, 2000). Since the consequences of climate change do pose a significant threat to all of us, a large degree of fear is a fitting response. Having fitting emotional responses constitutes a kind of good. As D’Arms and Jacobson (2023) suggest, a virtuous feeling can be understood either as a ‘fitting feeling’, in the sense that it accurately appraises certain features of an object, or a productive one that ‘contribute[s] to acting properly’ (pp. 177–78). While they observe that the two senses of virtuous feeling do not always converge, they conclude that we should accept both meanings – that is, a virtuous feeling is sometimes one that contributes to the right action, and other times one that is fitting. Such a view is especially plausible when we consider environmental virtues in particular. In his work, Sandler (2006) identifies three varieties of environmental virtues. For our purposes here, I will focus on environmentally responsive virtues and environmentally productive virtues. An environmentally responsive virtue concerns the ways that we respond to environmental entities. An environmentally productive virtue is ‘any virtue that promotes or maintains environmental health, the well being of nonhuman living individuals, or any other environmental goods or values’ (p. 257). While these two categories are not mutually exclusive, it is worth noting that not all environmentally responsive virtues are productive: some ways of responding to the environment can be admirable in themselves, even when they do not motivate us to promote environmental goods. It is plausible that responding to the environment with fitting fear can precisely be virtuous in this sense.

It is thus plausible that fear appeals can have more than one goal. They can aim to motivate right actions or to cultivate fitting fear. In cases where fitting fear is counterproductive, the question is which goal we should prioritise. A seemingly intuitive answer is that the goal of motivating right actions is always more important. After all, we are in a state of climate emergency that calls for urgent action, so one might think that we should always prioritise the goal of motivating people to act morally over other goals. Indeed, one might even think that prioritising any other goals is a ‘luxury’ that we simply cannot afford.

In response, I wish to suggest that the conflict between the productivity and fittingness of fear cannot always be easily resolved by prioritising productivity. Consider Srinivasan's (2018) work on fitting (she uses the term apt) but counterproductive anger experienced by victims of injustice. She notes that such an experience involves a normative conflict:

In such cases, victims of injustice must choose between making the world as it should be, and appreciating and marking the world as it is. This conflict is not merely psychically painful; it is a genuine normative conflict, a conflict involving competing and significant goods that often feel incomparable (p. 127).

The crucial point here is that two kinds of goods involved often feel incomparable: it is difficult to measure them on the same scale to judge which goal is more important. Even though making the world more just is an important goal for victims of injustice, it does not follow that such a goal should always be prioritised over the goal of ‘marking the world as it is’ through fitting anger. Similarly, even though the goal of motivating climate action is certainly important, it does not follow that such a goal should always be prioritised over the goal of cultivating fitting fear toward climate change. It might thus be difficult to determine whether we should prioritise motivating right actions or cultivating fitting fear.

Fortunately, appealing to the fear toward the negative physical consequences of climate change is not the only strategy we have to motivate climate action. As mentioned, an alternative strategy is to appeal to fear (along with emotions like guilt and shame) toward moral corruption. Further, there is a range of other emotions, such as wonder, that we might also be able to appeal to.⁵ If these strategies can effectively motivate climate action, we may hope that we can use them along with conventional fear appeals to help offset the side effects of the latter. Thus, when people are too callous to respond to the risks of climate change with fitting fear, it can be permissible to use conventional fear appeals to elicit fitting fear in them, as long as the action-motivating strategies are also implemented. This is because we can still be hopeful that the overall result of a combination of different emotional appeals will not be that of disengagement and inaction.

Yet, the decision to appeal to fear in climate change also needs to be sensitive to the consideration of justice, especially affective justice. In her work, Srinivasan (2018) goes on to suggest that having to choose between the fittingness and productivity of anger constitutes affective injustice: ‘the injustice of having to negotiate between one's apt emotional response to the injustice of one's situation and one's desire to better one's situation—a conflict of responsibilities that are “all but irreconcilable”’ (p. 135). Regardless of whether one agrees with this claim in the context of anger, it is unlikely that having to choose between the fittingness and productivity of fear, by itself, constitutes injustice. The counterproductivity of fitting anger in Srinivasan's analysis often stems from social prejudices: for example, as black people are stereotyped as violent, they are more likely to be dismissed from the public sphere because of anger. In comparison, in the context of climate change, the counterproductivity of fitting fear is, at least in most cases, not a result of unjust social settings. Rather, it is due to the nature of fear–that is, it is in the nature of fear that it can motivate us not just to ‘fight’, but also to ‘flight’ and ‘freeze’ when the object is too powerful for us to fight.

Note, however, that the normative conflict in fitting but unproductive fear is experienced to different degrees by different social groups. Climate change affects different social groups differently: poorer and socially marginalised groups are generally more vulnerable to threats like food insecurity, heat stress, and conflicts triggered by resource scarcity (Otto et al., 2017). For these social groups, a larger degree of fear is more fitting, since the threat posed by climate change is more serious. Yet, it is also likely that, for such social groups, fear can be even more counterproductive. As poor and marginalised social groups tend to have less power to enact meaningful changes to mitigate the effects of climate change, it might be particularly difficult to present a recommended response that is efficacious. There are thus two kinds of injustice here when we consider the affective experiences of such social groups. First, they tend to experience more fear and anxiety, which can have negative effects on one's wellbeing. There is increasing evidence that vulnerable groups like women and those in poorer countries are most negatively impacted by fear and anxiety related to climate change (Boluda-Verdú et al., 2022; Benevolenza and DeRigne, 2019). Second, lacking the power to enact meaningful changes, vulnerable groups also tend to experience more serious normative conflict between the fittingness and productivity of fear. It is the unequal extent to which they experience such a normative conflict, instead of the conflict itself, that constitutes a kind of affective injustice in the context of climate change. Considering this, we ought to be particularly cautious against using fear appeals when the targeted audiences belong to social groups that are already more vulnerable to experiencing fear and the associated normative conflicts.

Conclusions

Critics of fear appeals are often concerned that they tend to lead to disengagement in the context of climate change. One way to defend fear appeals in such a context is to argue that we need to improve them by recommending an efficacious response. Yet, as I have argued, it is difficult to improve fear appeals in this way. This is because the recommended responses–be it improving one's lifestyle or enacting changes on an institutional level–cannot be response-efficacious and self-efficacious at the same time.

Despite this, I have urged us against abandoning fear appeals in climate communication altogether. As I have suggested, one viable way to improve fear appeals is to change the object of fear to moral corruption. This is because the recommended actions, like voting and changing one's diet, can be efficacious: in virtue of fulfilling these duties, one's moral agency is effectively boosted. Such a strategy also reveals the need to appeal to other emotions like shame and love, along with fear.

I have further argued that, even in cases where fear is fitting but counterproductive, it is not the case that we should always refrain from using fear appeals. Fitting but counterproductive fear presents a normative conflict involving goods that are often incomparable. Further, we can use conventional fear appeals along with other strategies that may better motivate climate action, such as appealing to fear of moral corruption. Yet, considering the disproportionate affective burden experienced by certain social groups, I have also cautioned against appealing to fear when the target audiences belong to such groups.

Fearing well about climate change thus requires us to go beyond focusing only on fear, to consider the competing goals of climate communication, and to be sensitive to the considerations of justice. While this is a difficult task, I believe that articulating the difficulty is the first step toward fulfilling the task.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments. I thank Luke Russell and James Evans for reading and commenting on the paper. I am also grateful for the feedback I received at the Postgraduate Work-in-Progress seminar at the University of Sydney.

ORCID iD

Wendy Xin

Funding

The author was funded by an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship when undertaking the research.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

References

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