Yale Program on Climate Change Communication

The Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City is a vibrant hub for research, education, and exploration, dedicated to showcasing the state’s rich natural and cultural heritage. Through its extensive collections and interactive displays, the museum fosters a deeper understanding of the planet’s past, present, and future. Among its signature offerings is the permanent exhibit “A Climate of Hope,” which invites visitors to explore local impacts of climate change and discover actionable solutions.

Masooma Rahmaty from YPCCC’s Partnerships Program recently interviewed Lynne Zummo, Curator of Learning Science at the NHMU and Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, and Lisa Thompson, Exhibit Developer at the NHMU, to learn more about their work integrating climate change into the museum.

Masooma: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and your role at NHMU? 

Lisa: I am an Exhibit Developer for the Natural History Museum of Utah. I get to help decide what topics our exhibits are going to focus on, research those topics, write exhibit text, and help produce media. I love it. I get to be a perpetual student and work with amazing scientists and community members. 

Lynne: At the museum, my title is Curator of Learning Sciences, which is a faculty position within the University of Utah. I’m jointly appointed as the Curator of Learning Sciences and as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology. 

What this means is that I conduct much of my research at the museum. I study learning and learning processes, and I’m specifically interested in understanding learning processes around science-related social issues, like climate change. 

Masooma: How did you both get involved in climate work? What led you to where you are now?

Lynne: I think my path was a bit circuitous. My interest in climate originally started as an undergraduate student. I was studying geology and environmental science and then went to graduate school to study soil geochemistry in an effort to understand the carbon storage potential for soils in the Northeast. 

I quickly learned that perhaps, that wasn’t my true passion, so I got into teaching. I taught middle and high school Earth Science for several years. When I was doing that, it stood out to me that when I was teaching about climate change, my students approached the topic very differently than they did other topics in the Earth Sciences course. 

I felt like I was always struggling to figure out how to teach it best, because students were bringing all sorts of ideas, background experiences, and knowledge in a way that they didn’t for the rest of the curriculum. That got me interested enough in this question to go to graduate school for education. I ended up getting a PhD in science education, which was where I began to study learning processes around climate change and efforts to build better learning experiences around the issue.  And that brought me to Utah, where I’ve had the wonderful fortune to work at the Natural History Museum.

Lisa: I’ve been interested for quite a while in how museums can engage directly with issues that are of concern to members of our community. About ten years ago, I helped start a citizen science program at the museum and that led to an exhibit about urban nature that was really based on stories from people in our community. 

Then we had an opportunity to create a climate exhibit thanks to a generous researcher at the University of Utah who had NSF funding. He studies how photosynthesis in forests is being affected by climate change, but he was very generous in letting us run with the opportunity to create an exhibit about climate change that was grounded in the most recent research on effective climate communication strategies. So I think it was a combination of my interest in engaging with the community and having discussions with people, and this opportunity that came through a researcher. 

Masooma: From your perspective, what makes museums uniquely suited to turn climate data and science into experiences that motivate everyday action? 

Lisa: I think there are a couple of things that make museums really powerful sites for learning about climate change. One is that museums are storytellers, and when we do our work well, we’re not simply presenting data or science, we’re crafting stories that feel relevant and personal to our visitors. We also know there’s a high level of trust in museums compared to other places where people might get information in the community, like newspapers, nonprofits or state and federal government. So people trust museums as sources of information. 

And people come to museums for social experiences. They come in groups, which creates opportunities for conversations that might not occur in other settings. Museums have the potential to be a catalyst for conversations, especially around climate change, where we know from the Yale data that lots of people aren’t having conversations about climate change. I think that makes museums especially powerful. And Lynne, did you want to talk about the connection to place? 

Lynne: Oh, sure. I think something special about museums too, particularly natural history museums like ours, is they tend to have a very special connection to the local place. At our museum, a key goal is helping people understand the nature around us and our connection to it. That gives us this unique opportunity to help visitors understand climate impacts that are local and that are affecting the area, and also local solutions that are already happening.

Masooma:  Can you talk about the “A Climate of Hope” exhibit, and share one or two surprising insights you learned from it? 

Lisa: We did some preliminary front-end evaluation with our visitors to understand what they knew and felt about climate change, and one of the things we found out is that people didn’t think that solutions existed, and if they did, they were too expensive and weren’t being implemented. 

People often felt a lot of negative emotions—they were scared, they were angry, they were worried—but they didn’t think anyone else felt the same way that they did. Also, the number one thing that they were interested in learning about in an exhibit about climate change, (and we gave them a list of possibilities to choose from), was what a better, low-carbon future could look like.

I think people are so overwhelmed with stories about the future being terrible that they were really interested in what a vision of a better future could look like. 

So with that front-end evaluation as a grounding, we set out to find what the best research-based sources were saying about effective ways of communicating about climate change. And we discovered that a lot of the things that museums had been doing in the past weren’t particularly effective, like communicating through fear and urgency, framing the discussion as a debate (“is it real or not real”), talking about climate solutions in terms of sacrifice or guilt for your lifestyle choices, framing it in terms of places that might seem very far away from people’s daily lives, or simply piling on the data. 

So, in our exhibit, we wanted to reframe the discussion and replace those old frames with new frames. Instead of fear and urgent catastrophe, we wanted to introduce the idea of rational hope. Instead of a debate, it’s about a community that’s all in this together. Instead of the sacrifice, we emphasized that there’s a better future possible on many levels, that if we take action on climate change, we could have cleaner air, cheaper energy, and more walkable communities. 

Instead of distance, we wanted the content to be relevant here and now to people’s lives. And instead of simply piling on data, we wanted to tell stories, particularly about local people and  local solutions. 

So, that’s where we started from.. And then Lynne did amazing research on the exhibit. 

Lynne: Yeah. We’ve had the opportunity, after the exhibit was installed, to do research on in-the-moment learning by visitors. We recruited visitors and set them up with wearable GoPro cameras, and sent them around the exhibit. That gave us a way to listen in on their conversations and understand how different parts of the exhibit, and  how different frames we adopted were provoking conversations.  

A few things stood out from that research. One is the emphasis on local storytelling. For us, that meant Utah stories, images of local places experiencing impacts of climate change, such as greater wildfire intensity, hotter summers, and shorter winters, as well as local solutions that are already underway in the state. We found that these parts of the exhibit where the idea of local impacts and local solutions were emphasized engaged learners across the Six Americas spectrum in productive conversation, pulling in visitors who are Alarmed as well as those who are Dismissive. 

While this emphasis on local seemed to engage people from Utah and prompt productive conversations, it also worked for people not from Utah, because it prompted them to talk and think about a place that mattered to them. 

Across the dataset, we saw many productive conversations and evidence for the kinds of learning that we hoped to spark, happening in response to this emphasis on local places and local people. 

Another key insight that has emerged from the research is that thinking at the systems-level is really challenging for our visitors, as it is for many people, especially in a museum setting, where you only have a few seconds to help learners understand really big ideas. For example, one part of the exhibit features an interactive display intended to help visitors understand the energy transition, or how we’re moving towards electrification of transportation and building,  supported by a grid powered with renewable energy. But that’s a really big, complex, abstract idea, and helping people grasp that in a short amount of time is a challenge, one that we’re continuing to work through.

Another insight that emerged was around conversations. For research purposes, we seeded conversations by asking participants to stop at different points in the exhibit and draw conversation cards to discuss with each other. Originally, this was mostly to ensure we had enough data to analyze, but we found later, in interviews with participants, that they appreciated the in-depth conversations that the prompts led to. 

So, it seems like people are hungry for conversations about climate change, they just don’t quite know how to start them. Offering that scaffold, that structure, of a conversation prompt helped them engage with each other in ways that maybe they hadn’t in the past.

Masooma: Lisa, you mentioned that the exhibit uses different framing strategies. How does the ‘rational hope’ frame show up for visitors in A Climate of Hope? What might they see, feel, or take away from that experience?

Lisa: Sure! Just for clarity, “rational hope” is an idea that we adopted from climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe. She describes it as holding two ideas in your mind at the same time: one is the magnitude and urgency of the challenges we face, and the other is that solutions exist and people all over the world are already implementing them. 

It’s not a guarantee of success, but it is the idea that we have agency, the choices we make matter, and a better future is possible. 

I think one way people experience that in the exhibit is how we talk about local impacts. We don’t shy away from showing that there are impacts, but we don’t use imagery or language that is specifically designed to be scary or induce catastrophic thinking in talking about those impacts. 

After talking about impacts, we move into the ways people can mitigate them. We acknowledge that we can’t avoid all of them, but there’s a lot we can do to protect our communities and infrastructure.

And I think the place where people feel the most hopeful in the exhibit, is the solutions section, where they see what is already happening in Utah. It’s not just abstract, like “somewhere, someone is building solar” or “someone is addressing food waste.” They can see that it’s happening right here, in their community. I think that makes solutions feel tangible. And that’s really hopeful for people. 

Also the way we start the exhibit contributes to that. So the first experience that people have is they walk into this beautiful, circular space that immerses you in an aspen grove with a big projection in front of them and a huge mural behind. It is beautiful, natural, and grounded in Utah. In the past,  climate exhibits often opened with something scary, like “disaster is imminent,” right? But instead, we start people in this space of beauty and nature, and with the idea that hope is possible here. 

Masooma: How has your partnership with YPCCC informed NHMU’s climate communication strategies, both within A Climate of Hope and beyond the exhibit?

Lynne: I can talk about how it’s helped with research. One huge way that YPCCC has been helpful is the SASSY tool. It’s such an easy tool to use, and it’s a great way to categorize our audience. In my research, it’s been incredibly helpful in understanding the differences in how people respond to the exhibit. 

We can look at conversations, analyze what people are saying, and then link common patterns to different Six Americas categories, because we had folks take the SASSY questionnaire. For me, it’s been a very efficient way to make better sense of the research and to understand how the trends that we’re seeing tie to our audience.

Also, on a different level, when it comes to how we’ve been communicating about the exhibit itself, both to our team at the museum and to other teams beyond our museum, the very existence of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and its tools helps convey  that climate communication is a scientific field. Climate communication is empirical and research-based, and we’re not just making this up or going with our personal feelings or preferences. There is a whole scientific field backing up this approach. So just having that kind of credibility to point to has been very helpful.

Lisa: And I’ll add that the Six Americas framework helped us really get clarity on who our audience was for the exhibit. After learning about the framework and characteristics of each group, it helped us really see that we probably weren’t the most effective messengers for Dismissive or Doubtful audiences. But we also saw that the vast majority of people fall into the Cautious, Concerned, and Alarmed, and those were the audiences that were movable and that we wanted to try to reach.

Masooma: What is something unique that NHMU does that other climate communicators could learn from?

Lynne: Well, something that is really unique for us is that we have the opportunity to do research on the exhibits we develop. With that, we have a chance to iterate and really refine the different pieces of an exhibit. So with Climate of Hope, for example, there are several components. Over the course of probably two years, Lisa and her team would develop a component, I’d work with them to create a cardboard prototype, and then we’d test it with visitors.I’d collect research data on it, and based on that, we would refine the idea and try something else. We repeated this process until we had an exhibit that we felt good about, one that had empirical data supporting that people were learning and making sense of it in the way that we wanted. Even now that it’s installed, we are still collecting research data. And looking forward as we think about potential revisions to the exhibit, we’re viewing this exhibit as a place of iteration and as a lab where we can continue to test new ideas.

Masooma: How do you remain hopeful and inspired?

Lisa: I find it incredibly inspiring to talk with passionate people across Utah who are working on projects to reduce emissions or address climate impacts in a wide variety of ways. Often, these projects don’t get much attention in the media, so you might think not much climate work is happening in Utah, but nothing could be further from the truth!

Similarly, I find hope in listening to podcasts that provide a bigger picture of the rapid pace of innovation on climate solutions, the continued steep decline in the prices of solar and batteries, and the many other forces that are driving the transition to renewable energy.

Finally, remembering that every fraction of a degree of warming we prevent matters inspires me to keep working to try to tell stories that help museum visitors find hope and agency.

Lynne: I echo Lisa’s sentiment about finding inspiration in the amazing work that people across Utah are doing to implement solutions that make our lives better. Additionally, I’ll add that I’ve found that doing the research that I do, and seeing moments in the data when museum guests get inspired themselves and take up these new, hopeful ways of talking and thinking about the future gives me great hope.

We thank Lynne and Lisa for sharing their time, insights, and the thoughtful work behind A Climate of Hope exhibit. Their commitment to research-driven, locally grounded, and climate communication that connects with people offers powerful lessons for how museums can inspire connection and action.