Resource Type: Research & Articles

The Lab wrote our first newsletter about the GND* way back in January of 2019 when we walked through how both the policy and the organizing happening around the climate, labor, and justice framework reflected a number of evidence-based best practices for building a powerful movement. And WOW, a lot of progress has been made since then – including a suite of policies and programs like solar for all, direct pay, and the new American Climate Corps – with the GND’s fingerprints all over them. We are collaborating on this week’s newsletter with our good friends at the Green New Deal Network (GNDN), who have been serving as the hub of the GND movement, turning regular people’s demands into policy wins since 2019.

The climate crisis requires the human-powered collective action to implement solutions globally and with social justice in mind at every step. This is the central message of Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization focused on “advancing effective, science-based climate solutions and strategies; fostering bold, new climate leadership; and promoting new climate narratives and new voices.” Project Drawdown was the inspiration for The Wild Center’s Climate Solutions exhibition, a new permanent exhibition that opened in July of 2022. The challenge for the exhibition team was if (and how) to leap over the fear-inducing facts of climate change and embrace an alternative reality where we are already on the road to solving the problem and everyone is inspired to join in with their own self-defined action. The Wild Center decided to work with museum evaluation firm Kera Collective to conduct front-end research, drawing from a body of public perception research by Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC). The research asks four simple multiple-choice questions, which allow researchers to segment respondents into one of six audiences, ranging from dismissive to alarmed, based on their climate attitudes. The exhibition-development team used the results of this front-end research to focus in on the target audience for the exhibition.