Crafting the right nonprofit brand messaging can be especially challenging for organizations working on climate communication and knowledge mobilization, where urgency, scientific complexity, and polarization collide. But for some further hope and creativity in our approaches, I know one place we can look to for inspiration: up North. The Arctic is a particularly interesting region for discussing climate change, cooperation, and degradation. As a result, the region is rife with examples of effective—and ineffective—climate narratives used by politicians, leaders, academics, and organizations alike to change minds and move agendas.
At Constructive, I’ve spent years helping mission-driven organizations, including those in the climate sector, shape meaningful narratives and digital strategies that drive impact. In 2024, I took a sabbatical from my role as Digital Strategist to dive deeper into a topic I’ve long been passionate about: The Arctic. I moved from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Reykjavík, Iceland, where I enrolled in a semester-long graduate program at Háskóli Íslands (The University of Iceland), studying the intersection of climate, cooperation, and policy in the world’s northernmost capital.
Through my coursework and attending the Arctic Circle conference, I realized that many of the insights I gained about climate communication and cooperation in the Arctic have broader relevance across the climate space. I found invaluable lessons on how storytelling, framing, and trust-building can shape public perception and policy across continents. In this article, I’ll share some of those takeaways and explore what they might mean for nonprofit communicators and practitioners in their corners of the world.
Cultivate Unity: Frame Climate Action as a Shared Purpose
Something that became immediately clear to me from reading scholarly work and attending the Arctic Circle conference was that climate change—and the need to tackle climate change—is a real unifier in Arctic geopolitics. For instance, one of, if not the most important facets of Arctic governance and cooperation today is The Arctic Council. Established in 1991 with a focus on environmental protection, the Council includes representatives from the eight Arctic states, Arctic Indigenous Peoples, and various observer representatives. While the original environmental protection strategy that started it all has since evolved into a council that discusses an ever-widening number of issues, the environment and climate change work remains a central concern of the forum’s working groups. In this way, a commitment to the climate has brought together the Arctic states into much wider avenues of research and resource cooperation, as well as providing an essential forum for Indigenous voices to be heard.
The foundation for such cooperation can, in part, be traced to the deep connection between the Arctic Peoples’ climate and their identity. In the Arctic, the climate isn’t something that’s ignored or disregarded societally—it’s a piece of Arctic Peoples’ identity and something that people from different nations or Indigenous groups share. The ice, Aurora Borealis, long dark polar winters, Arctic flora, and fauna are unique in nature, and as Arctic scholar Ingrid A. Medby puts it in an academic article on Arctic identity, it’s “not about owning the Arctic, but about being Arctic.” Indigenous people have lived on the ice for generations, relying on their understanding of the environment for survival, with some surviving on subsistence hunting and living nomadic lifestyles. In the Arctic, the climate is the way of life, and people from various Arctic states and Indigenous communities feel kinship with each other because of their shared environment.
Often in climate change communications, we discuss avoiding polarizing ideas or language—we just assume that the climate is a topic that may pull people apart. While it’s important to consider how climate change can be a polarizing topic, we see in the Arctic that it has an intense capacity to bring people together. Climate communicators can remind people of this by referencing examples of impressive climate collaboration that have already taken place (like I just did in the Arctic) to overcome the often-encountered hesitations that climate change is too large or insurmountable an issue for us to tackle.
And it’s not only Arctic Peoples that must live in harmony with their environment, so climate communicators can take on the vital role of reminding everyone, including city dwellers, people living in tropical locations, or other non-Arctic locations, that the unique aspects of their climate directly impact their lives and their community. While the Arctic may have especially strong links between identities and the climate, these links are ever-present worldwide.
Demystify Complexity: Communicate Climate Science with Clarity
For Arctic Peoples, the effects of climate change are often not distant concepts. Instead, they are real effects that are both seen and felt. However, this doesn’t mean that communicators can make blanket assumptions about the knowledge levels of any audience, because climate change is intensely complex.
Consider Greenland, where the glaciers have been melting, and the climate has been changing at rates that are perceptible to Greenlanders. A recent study showed that while around 89% of the largest Greenlandic Inuit people group, Kalaallit Nunaat, agree that climate change is happening, only 52% percent of the population in the survey indicated they knew climate change is primarily caused by humans. Even among Arctic Peoples and Arctic policymakers, scholars, and students, there are still varying degrees of climate knowledge and understanding.
Take another example. On the last day of the Arctic Circle conference, I listened to a plenary session titled “Is the AMOC Shutting Down?.” In this session, Stefan Rahmstorf, a Professor of Physics from Potsdam University, spoke about the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—a water circulation pattern along the Atlantic Ocean. He presented proof that scientists have seen that the AMOC is weakening. The proof shows the circulation pattern has been slowing over recent years, creating a “cold blob,” a section of water in the Northern Atlantic region that’s cooling significantly, as well as causing significant warming of waters off the Eastern United States Coast. Professor Rahmstorf discussed this evidence as well as future tipping points and potential climate consequences of an AMOC shutdown, including significant surface temperature changes and changes in rainfall patterns regionally and globally.
As the talk ended, I remember looking around the large conference hall full of Arctic professionals and seeing a number of faces with the same degree of shock I was feeling. While there were undoubtedly some who were intimately familiar with the AMOC, I spoke to multiple scholars and my fellow students at the conference who were also either unaware of the AMOC entirely or had only a vague idea about its functioning and the potential consequences of changes. Even among regional experts, there’s still much to learn about the various and complex phenomena related to climate change.
As climate communicators, we need to always remember this. It’s our job to break down complex topics without assuming any knowledge levels (while treating our audiences with respect and recognizing and relating to audience members with lived experiences). We can connect the real experiences of climate change to the more complex science and consider when and how much complex information is needed in each scenario.
For me, the information presented on the AMOC built a bridge to a better understanding of a phenomenon I already knew was taking place: the warming of the Atlantic off the Eastern coast. As a lifelong New Jersey resident, I was very aware that there were discussions about the waters off the beaches warming every season. While I knew this was caused by human-induced climate change, I was unfamiliar with the slowing of the AMOC. Once again, this drives home that while Arctic Peoples may be more intensely feeling the effects of climate change right now, there’s not one human on Earth who has not experienced some type of climate disturbances. We are responsible for building the bridges between these experiences and the information about them that our audiences need to take informed action.
Recognize Economic Realities: Reframe Incentives for Climate Degradation
While there already are—and there will be—more negative consequences to climate change in the Arctic region, this isn’t the only regional narrative that’s been at play for the last few years. At the beginning of my university program, as I was introduced to the Arctic region across various courses, there was much talk of “A New Arctic.” The “New Arctic” has “New Drivers” of action and economic reward. As the Arctic ice melts, new, potentially lucrative opportunities have arisen in the region. This includes new polar shipping routes that could potentially be faster and cheaper, as well as further extraction of precious resources from Arctic lands and oceans.
This is an apt time to mention a very topical development in Arctic geopolitics: Trump’s attempt to purchase Greenland. While security is one factor here, an arguably larger reason for Trump’s interest is economic: the belief that as Greenland’s ice melts, new opportunities for drilling rare materials will present themselves. While a lot of these opportunities are still just hopes for the future, undoubtedly, their possibilities are affecting Arctic geopolitics right now. There are a number of questions being raised over who “owns” polar routes, how and where extractive activities should be completed, the effects of these new industries on the climate, people, and more. While there is still steadfast commitment from regional actors to stop Arctic ice from melting, one could argue that there are also significant incentives at play for some to keep the ice melting (or even to accelerate its melting).
This was eye-opening for me to learn. It got me thinking about our approaches to climate communications, specifically our tendency to focus on why climate degradation needs to stop while often not addressing some of these potential incentives for the climate to continue to change. We cannot just ignore these motivations. Rather, we need to explain them and explain why this talk of embracing climate change and giving up the climate fight is not the answer.
Unfortunately, we must consider how enticing some of these “embracing” climate change ideas can be. Shorter shipping routes leading to faster shipping of items at cheaper rates sounds great on the surface. But when we present these potential positives with the adverse effects of Arctic sea ice loss (such as more extreme weather, sea level rise, permafrost melting, releasing more greenhouse gasses into the air, etc.), now our audiences can see the full picture.
We can also use our communications to stray away from the binary. Luckily, in the Arctic, the interests in these new economic opportunities have not yet meant less focus on the climate. We need to communicate that the choice that’s often presented between a strong economy and a strong climate isn’t the only option; rather, we can continue to consider the climate in discussing how we can grapple with economies in a rapidly changing world.
Prioritize Transparency to Build Trust in Your Organization’s Impact
Arctic geopolitics may seem full of impressive and perhaps unprecedented cooperation, but to say only this would be ahistorical and untruthful. Like any other area of the globe, there are a host of actors with various goals at play, and as a result, we see some tensions between states and other actors involved in the region. Especially with the recent changes in the Arctic, some Arctic specialists have been suggesting that security in the region is ever-increasingly unstable. The Arctic Circle conference I attended was widely regarded as the most security-focused event in its 12-year history.
One of these areas of tension within Arctic geopolitics comes from the participation in Arctic affairs of non-Arctic states—states that do not possess any Arctic territory. Non-Arctic states, such as China, Japan, and many others, often make their case for being involved in Arctic work on the basis of climate change. Arctic leaders in such states suggest that because the Arctic is so important to our climate, it makes the region the concern of all nations, not only those directly possessing Arctic land. As may be expected, not all leaders from states with Arctic territories agree with this notion. Some leaders fear that non-Arctic states may be only using climate change as a pawn to gain more power in the Arctic region, a place that may become an economic powerhouse in the future if the ice continues to melt.
We see the same types of hesitations from a number of actors in the climate space; donors need to be skeptical about the organizations they are entrusting with their money. As social awareness grows, so does greenwashing—the act of organizations misleading the public about how much environmental work they accomplish. Arctic leaders are largely concerned that non-Arctic countries are doing essentially this—greenwashing their intentions in the region.
As communicators, we need to lay out the facts of exactly what our organization is working on and where, showing our impact clearly in numbers, words, visuals, and more. We all know the value of transparency, but it’s worth reiterating here. Consider keeping track of questions your organization often gets and finding ways to answer them on your website or in your other marketing channels (such as social media, newsletters, etc.). You can never offer too much information to reassure your audiences.
To Wrap Up
There’s a global idea that Arctic collaboration is “exceptional,” and this type of climate work just cannot be done outside the region. This idea has specifically thrived in global geopolitics ever since the creation of the Arctic Council, which functions without any comprehensive legally binding nature even today. And it’s true, the Arctic represents a unique region of transnational collaboration among people with strong shared identities who see climate change happening in their homes. But, just because this is all true doesn’t mean we should write off the lessons that Arctic work can teach us more widely as activists, nonprofit workers, and communicators.
Something I noticed throughout my coursework and the Arctic Circle conference was that the way forward in the Arctic is still unclear, and so room in the sector is being made for discussions of all possibilities. During the Arctic Circle conference, I heard a number of voices and dissenting voices (often even in the same room). People asked hard questions. People agreed. They disagreed. One of the most notable aspects of the conference is that anyone of any status can ask a question to any leader, even figures as prominent as NATO Admiral Rob Bauer. As a new Arctic student, I was allowed into every room and every conversation. The open communication astounded me.
For me, the Arctic represents hope. Hope for continued and further climate commitments more globally into the future. I’m excited to continue to learn more about what the future of the Arctic may hold, and I’m excited to apply all of these communication takeaways with our clients here at Constructive.
In Arctic geopolitics, you will hardly go a day without hearing a few familiar catchphrases. While these terms may be industry clichés, I will end with one that particularly resonates.
“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.”
