Instagram posts personalizing the climate crisis have a greater impact and a broader reach

In recent years, social media, and particularly Instagram, have become much more than just apps. They are an extremely powerful tool with which any individual, agent or organization can reach its audience more quickly, directly and simply. This can help raise awareness in a visually attractive way that has greater potential in all areas, including environmental activism, a field which is growing as social awareness grows.

Now, a research group led by researchers from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has analysed emerging visual narratives aimed at raising awareness around environmental and climate challenges on Instagram. "The goal of this study is to define and find, from a communicational standpoint, these distinctive features of Instagram profiles and accounts dedicated to communicating this kind of issue," explained Gemma San Cornelio, researcher in the MEDIACCIONS group at the UOC's Faculty of Information and Communication Sciences and one of the lead authors of the article, alongside Elisenda Ardèvol, professor in the UOC's Faculty of Arts and Humanities, and Sandra Martorell, researcher at the Department of Audiovisual Communication, Documentation and History of Art at the Universitat Politècnica de València.

More specifically, it has dissected new forms of communicating issues associated with climate change, the climate crisis generally, the different ways of communicating this content and how to achieve greater reach and audience engagement. All this was performed on the basis of a qualitative approach focusing on 60 Instagram accounts, some 300 posts and interviews with users.

"This kind of communication differs from previous forms of environmental communication, which had been led by the mass media, be this traditional media or even digital, led by media corporations and institutions. These messages are led by users and their followers, which is really important when it comes to the size of the community they wish to reach and who they seek to convince about these environmental issues and to involve in the process of change, to engage so that they take part and take action," said San Cornelio.

New communication models and their narratives

With regard to new communication models and their narratives, the posts with the greatest social media impact are those seeking a positive tone, emphasizing elements that cause a positive emotional response. For example, Instagram posts showing images of different environments that appeal to the emotions by connecting with nature.

Another feature of these messages is that they tend to make a call to action whose motivation is linked to a specific environmental issue from a personal perspective. In this way, they seek to break with traditional doom-laden or negative images to avoid creating feelings of guilt in their community, whilst also calling on them to mobilize in a positive way.

These are some of the features common to these posts, be these using images, first-person accounts, achievements, memes, humour or other elements of popular culture aimed at promoting the environmental cause.

"This emerging visual narrative is propositive. It encourages doing things on an individual level. From a more activist-related standpoint, this might be more questionable, because it doesn't focus on fighting or making demands of institutions and governments, but rather on individual change, things that you can do for yourself, though this is not incompatible with seeking such structural changes as well," explained San Cornelio.

However, it should be noted that this kind of communication model intrinsically tends to involve some link with the lifestyle or day-to-day existence of these eco-influencers, aimed at reducing their impact on the world and creating a positive footprint by personalizing climate action.

"By leveraging this strategy, they can reach a greater number of people on the internet and boost the loyalty of members of the community around these profiles because they usually have very committed accounts, do their research and provide official data," she added.

The general behaviour of these users isn't necessarily seen on other social networks. "These special features cannot necessarily be extrapolated to other platforms, as Instagram's audience behaves differently," she said.

Innovative environmental activism focuses

Given this, these experts believe that, to achieve a greater social impact, it is vital to build narratives around climate-related and environmental issues through new narratives and new media to reach places that scientists and legislators don't or can't. In this regard, eco-influencers and environmental activists can contribute a fresh approach to tackling climate-related and environmental challenges.

More specifically, these new narratives show a cultural shift in communication strategies, providing an innovative approach to mobilizing the public towards environmental engagement.

"Eco-influencers on Instagram have very clear goals, which are to raise awareness around the cause of the environment, to inform, to educate and also to reach the greatest possible number of people, as I've said before, so that they feel empowered to do something, however small. The idea of doing your bit is important and lots of people doing a little bit is important – this also forms part of their narrative and of their objectives," concluded San Cornelio.

This article is one of a series of works funded by Spain's Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities carried out by this group of researchers in recent years focusing on the different characteristics of environmental activism in digital media, especially Instagram. They form part of a broader research project looking at cultural narratives and social action, and their relationship with the public in contemporary society.

This research by the UOC contributes to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13, Climate Action.

Article reference

San Cornelio G, Martorell S and Ardèvol E (2024) "My goal is to make sustainability mainstream": emerging visual narratives on the environmental crisis on Instagram. Front. Commun. 8:1265466. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2023.1265466 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1265466    

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