Charles Rotter
A recent paper in Climatic Change, “Social and psychological factors shaping public views of unconventional climate advocates” by Xiongzhi Wang, Rebecca Colvin, Kelly Fielding and Winnifred Louis, published October 24, opens with something close to a confession. From the abstract:
Climate communication faces a messenger challenge: while the urgency of climate crisis demands broad-based public engagement, conventional advocates who are left-leaning environmentalists often struggle to reach diverse audiences due to identity-based barriers and negative stereotypes.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-026-04321-2
The introduction spells out the stereotypes, with citations:
Some people hold negative stereotypes about climate activists, associating them with traits such as militancy, eccentricity, disruption, radicality, being a tree-hugger, or hippie characteristics (Feinberg et al. 2017; Hoffarth and Hodson 2016; Hutchings 2005).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-026-04321-2
Nowhere does the paper consider asking the conventional advocates to be less militant, disruptive or eccentric, and the remedy it reaches for is new faces:
These interrelated communication challenges have created a strategic imperative for climate movements to diversify their messenger base beyond conventional advocates. Recent literature has highlighted the potential of “unconventional advocates”, that is, individuals or groups, such as farmers, firefighters, investors, and religious groups, who champion climate action from within social identities not typically associated with environmentalism (Boddington et al. 2026; Wang et al. 2026).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-026-04321-2
The people who need reaching are described as “holdout constituencies, including political conservatives, business sectors, resource industry workers, and religious denominations,” which makes a good part of Queensland sound like it has barricaded itself in a bank. The audience the researchers wanted was the “general public,” defined as “people who are not already activated for or against climate action,” a phrase I had previously only heard applied to sleeper agents.
The work comes out of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, DP220103155, “The effect of unconventional advocates on public support for climate policy,” worth A$432,467. The grant summary says the project “aims to discover whether the presence of unconventional climate advocates in public debate can foster broad-based support for climate policy in Australia,” and lists “political conservatives, farmers, resource industry workers, and businesspeople” as the unconventional advocates, which means the farmers had been cast more than two years before the first interview.
The method was a walk in the park, more or less:
A public intercept approach was used, whereby passersby were approached directly by the researcher and invited to participate in a short interview.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-026-04321-2
The first author walked up to people in parks, shopping areas and footpaths in suburban Brisbane, Hervey Bay, Chinchilla and Dalby, between April and July 2024. Each got a $10 gift card. They were shown image cards carrying content from the websites of eight advocacy groups (Australian Parents 4 Climate Action, Doctors for the Environment Australia, Vets for Climate Action, Australian Firefighters Climate Alliance, Hunter Jobs Alliance, Investor Group on Climate Change, Australian Religious Response to Climate Change and Farmers for Climate Action) and asked what they thought of each. Ninety interviews made the cut, and they “lasted 19 min on average, ranging from approximately 6 to 39 min.”
The first author also did the analysis:
Data analysis followed the principles of reflexive thematic analysis, a systematic yet flexible approach to identifying patterns or “themes” within qualitative data (Braun and Clarke 2013, 2021; Byrne 2022). We used a latent approach to interpret underlying meanings in participants’ expressed views of unconventional climate advocates.
Coding was conducted by the first author, who was most familiar with the material through conducting the interviews, transcribing approximately one quarter of the recordings, and engaging in repeated close readings of all transcripts.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-026-04321-2
In plain terms, one researcher read the transcripts of the researcher’s own chats with strangers and sorted their remarks into piles, and the “latent approach” means the piles were built from what the researcher took people to mean underneath what they actually said. Nothing was counted or measured, and nobody else can check the sorting, because “Data and materials are not available due to research ethics (participant confidentiality).” A reading of what people really meant, by the person who asked the questions, checked against transcripts no one else may see, is an opinion, just written up in the format of a finding.
The rest of the team then agreed on the piles:
Theme development was a collaborative effort involving all authors, who collectively possess decades of experience in researching, participating in, and engaging with the Australian climate and environmental movement. Team meetings were held throughout the analytical process to discuss theme patterns, refine interpretations, resolve coding disagreements, and strengthen analytical rigor. The final thematic framework was reviewed and refined through multiple iterations until the research team reached consensus on the most robust and meaningful interpretation of the data.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-026-04321-2
The people deciding what Queenslanders meant are, by their own description, participants in the movement whose messaging problem the study exists to fix. The same paper declares “The authors have no financial or non-financial interests to disclose.”
The result is the paper’s Fig. 3:
The figure is five ovals and a head with gears in it, and what it says is that the public is more inclined to listen to people like themselves, people whose jobs matter, people who don’t seem to be in it for the money, and people who have a reason to be talking about the subject, and is a little surprised when an unexpected group turns up, which anyone who has ever run for school board could have told them for a good deal less than A$432,467.
The surprise oval was supposed to be the secret weapon. The introduction says unexpected messengers can overcome stereotypes “through leveraging shared values, ingroup status, and an element of surprise to disrupt social and political divisions.” The paper’s own Table 1 then lists the two groups people liked best, Farmers for Climate Action and the Australian Firefighters Climate Alliance, as rating “Less” on surprise. The groups that rated “More” on surprise were the Hunter Jobs Alliance, the Investor Group on Climate Change and the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change, and all three were rated “Less” on trustworthiness and legitimacy. Nobody was startled to hear a farmer worry about the weather, while the investors, the jobs alliance and the religious group collected their surprise points and lost them again on trust.
Many of the quotes in the paper are about the groups rather than the climate. One interviewee explained food security this way:
Farmers are definitely the biggest one. Everyone needs to eat. If farmers stopped working for one week, half the population would starve. Farmers need to be protected, they are the protected species
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-026-04321-2
The paper books this affection for farmers as a pathway for climate messaging. The one interviewee who suggested advocacy groups were putting on a show for the political left got filed under trustworthiness appraisals “underpinned by pre-existing climate beliefs,” which is a polite way of saying his opinion was a symptom.
The practical advice reads like a recruiting brief:
Climate movements seeking to diversify their messenger base should prioritise amplifying atypical voices that can generate positive evaluations across multiple social and psychological factors. For example, groups seen as legitimate, trustworthy, and central to societal functioning within particular social and political contexts are likely to be evaluated favourably as climate advocates and thus have broader persuasive appeal in climate communication. In our study in Australia, these groups included firefighters and farmers, although other groups may play similar roles in different contexts.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-026-04321-2
The concluding remarks promise guidance on “how to strategically leverage the power of diverse unconventional messengers.”
Farmers for Climate Action itself is not shy about who backs it. Its 2024-25 annual report says it represents “more than 8,400 farmers across Australia, backed by more than 80,000 community supporters,” and that “In Financial Year 2024-2025, we were 98 percent funded by donations and philanthropic grants.” That works out to nearly ten supporters for every farmer, which is a fairly conventional ratio for an unconventional advocate.
The 90 interviews have now produced two papers. A companion study from “the same set of intercept interviews,” Wang et al. 2026 in Environmental Communication, reports that farmers, firefighters and vets were “widely viewed as trustworthy and legitimate.” And the limitations section of this one already has the sequel planned:
Survey-based methods could help quantify the importance of each factor and examine whether, for example, trustworthiness consistently outweighs group importance in shaping public support.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-026-04321-2
Next comes putting numbers on the piles. That usually means asking people to rate how much they trust a farmer on a scale of 1 to 7, then feeding the ratings into statistical machinery built to tease precise relationships out of real measurements, which will dutifully report the strength of each oval to two decimal places, though every one of those numbers will still be just how somebody felt about farmers that afternoon.
Did any of the 90 Queenslanders get asked whether the problem might be the message rather than the messenger?
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Quotes and figure from Wang et al. 2026, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-026-04321-2, used under CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
