Strategies to create risk awareness and legitimacy: the Swedish climate campaign

Social means of risk regulation often only arise in response to media attention and public opinion. In contrast, in the case of climate change, the Swedish government proactively launched a public information campaign to promote public awareness and knowledge of the risks associated with climate change, with the explicit objective of promoting acceptance of public means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This paper analyses the framing of climate change in the Swedish climate campaign and its communication strategy. What was the message of the campaign narrative? What did it imply concerning the causes, effects, and management of and responsibility for climate change? What means were used to communicate the risks of climate change? The paper analyses the campaign narrative, its references to various affective images of climate change, and the various storytelling techniques it used. It concludes that the Swedish climate campaign relied on a unidirectional view of risk communication and proffered a narrative containing inconsistencies and ambivalence. The analysis demonstrates that despite a thoroughly worked‐out strategy, a well‐defined message, and the intention to speak clearly, a complex problem such as climate change cannot easily be transformed into a single, coherent story.