Climate change after denial: Global reach, global responsibilities, and public relations

Taking climate change as the 21st century's major global threat, this paper considers three significant public relations challenges arising from it. The first is how the field can engage with the social equity and ecological dimensions in ways that might enhance rather than diminish the profession's public reputation. The second is how the discipline adapts to deal with the radical perceptual shifts accompanying the meteorological transformations and possible geopolitical fallout, and the third is the issue of trust – interlinked with emotions, economics, ecology, and neuroscience – as the strategy of eco-catastrophe denial becomes less and less tenable. The paper also considers possible responses to these challenges.