Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank dedicated to achieving ambitious leadership for the environment.

I'm Holly Brazier-Tope, Deputy Director of Politics at Green Alliance.

As Parliament returns from recess this week, politics and media are shifting back into high gear.

The Labour government heads into its second year with climate and net zero as a defining

but increasingly contested area of policy. Public attention is fragmented by global insecurity,

the cost of living crisis and political polarisation. Against this backdrop, how we talk about

climate has never been more important and never more difficult. This episode explores

the crisis of communication on climate, what stories resonate, how political communication compares

with the past, and what is at stake in the busy political season ahead. For this episode,

I'm thrilled to be joined by Fiona Harvey, Environment Editor at The Guardian, who has been reporting on the environment

for more than 20 years. Thank you so much for joining me, Fiona. Let's get started by talking a bit

about climate narratives and how the public engage with climate and environment issues. So in the

broadest sense, how do you think climate comms and public salience and understanding is going in the

current political context? I think it's actually going rather well, which may be surprising to some

people, because, you know, we have this prevailing narrative that people are going against net zero,

that people are fed up with environmental issues. There's a kind of a narrative

that we should all just pack up and go home because the foreign party narrative is one,

and everyone just wants to go back to fossil fuels. That's not true when you ask people.

And even people who say that their intention is to vote reform actually want action

on the climate.

They don't buy into this climate denialism, this anti-net zero narrative that's being

pushed by the Reform Party, but also by the Tories.

...