Introduction

This chapter provides an introduction to the edited book Communicating about Climate Change: Making Environmental Messaging Accessible. It provides a brief background about the context for communicating about climate change and the challenges of doing such communication effectively. The editors discuss how the book’s contributed chapters illustrate how climate change communication can operate in a way that demonstrates key themes like easy access, relevance, and understandability to audiences, and how communication of such information allows multiple stakeholders to participate in efforts to build resilience. This chapter also points to how making climate change information and messaging accessible potentially aligns with outcomes such as greater participation in environmental decision-making, behaviors that are informed by risk, and enhanced organizational resilience. The organization of the book into three sections and short overviews of the chapters in these sections are provided.