UCLA’s Jon Christensen on the theory and practice of climate change communication
Jon Christensen is an adjunct assistant professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the Department of History, and the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a senior fellow in UCLA’s cityLAB, editor of LENS Magazine, and a partner and strategic adviser at Stamen Design, a National Design Award-winning interactive design and technology firm.
Jon Christensen multifaceted overstretches the prefix multi-. He is an adjunct assistant professor in UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (or IoES), the Department of History, and the Center for Digital Humanities. At the IoES, he is also a journalist-in-residence, a founder of the institute’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies, and editor of its LENS Magazine. In addition, he is a senior fellow at UCLA’s cityLAB, a think tank within the university’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, and a partner and strategic adviser at Stamen Design, which recently won the 2017 National Design Award for interactive design from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
A longtime environmental journalist and science writer—his work has appeared in the New York Times, Nature, and many other prominent print, online, and broadcast outlets—Christensen was the executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University before moving to UCLA. In a recent conversation with Bulletin editor in chief John Mecklin, Christensen discussed his communications-related role in a recent report from 50 researchers and scholars in the University of California system, “Bending the Curve: Ten Scalable Solutions for Carbon Neutrality and Climate Stability.” The report argues that lessons learned from the UC system’s own efforts to go carbon-neutral by 2025 can serve as at least a partial roadmap for the world’s attempts to deal with climate change.
Christensen was a senior editor for “Bending the Curve” and since its publication has been involved in coordinating a partnership between UC and the heavily trafficked Voxwebsite, which, by its own account, “explains the news” and is aimed primarily (though not entirely) at millennials. The partnership produced an innovative series of videos, “Climate Lab,” that aim to put some of the communications lessons from University of California research to practical use in communicating about climate change. The six videos “star” conservation scientist and UCLA visiting researcher M. Sanjayan—an engaging personality whose television experience ranges from PBS, BBC, and National Geographic documentaries to appearances on The Today Showand The Late Show with David Letterman—and explore “surprising ways to change how we think and act about climate change.” The videos have received more than five million views."— John Mecklin, Jul. 27, 2017
Read the full article and the accompanying interview at the Bulliten of the Atomic Scientists website.