Emotional Power and Communicating about Climate Change: Engaging Urban People with Bushfire

Abstract

Amidst escalating global concern about the intensification of bushfire (wildfire), we investigate how interactive, data-driven articles shape people’s engagement with this expanding environmental crisis. We build on critical discourse that positions climate informatics products as sociopolitical actors, as well as research on polarisation in environmental communication, through an empirical study of bushfire news coverage and its reception by urban Australians. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 7 fire science experts and 12 city-dwellers, who engaged with three interactive news articles. Our analysis highlights the challenges of navigating uncertainty, polarised and shifting discourse, and the emotional burden of bushfire communication. We show that engagement is shaped by a dynamic interplay between affective and cognitive sense-making, which can both motivate and inhibit attention. Participants expressed a desire for actionable, place-relevant information, yet often encountered barriers in interpreting complex or ambiguous visualisations. Based on these findings, we identify design opportunities for interactive articles that (1) respond to audiences’ existing exposure to environmental discourse, (2) scaffold engagement with uncertainty, (3) connect audiences with distant people and places, and (4) support pathways to collective action.