Cultures of Climate Responses: Food Club as Socio-Economic and Environmental Helping Hand

Reporting on climate change is often concerned with making people aware that something needs to be done and that people need to change their behaviour (Smith, 2022). But as polling by YouGov (2023) shows, the populace already things climate change is the fourth most important topic that politicians need to address, suggesting significant awareness and, indeed, concern. In this paper, we argue that the populace is often already doing a lot, but that the climate work people do is often not visible as such because it’s not couched in the explicit terms of climate action. Reporting back from a project based in Liverpool, the UK, where we observed and filmed a number of climate-positive action of community groups, we highlight that there is a cultural element that needs to be taken into account when reporting on climate action and change: groups operate in specific cultural contexts which make their actions more or less visible as climate-positive work. We will screen one of the ten-minute programmes (Love Wavertree Food Club) we made about the different groups and show how different subgroups in the population are more or less able to understand their work within the context of climate action.
The programmes are available as a playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBrk-wPNLaVmNDWCCGE5fB5gvMxKQ8n4x&si=bhGarDWMGNC64gKU