The terms ‘Ticking time bomb’ or ‘Armageddon’, visually supported by a forest fire or a sad polar bear on a melting ice floe: you are probably reading a report about climate change. Journalists regularly use metaphors and alarming images to explain this problem. The question is: How effective is this? Fontys Journalism and the National Climate Platform are investigating the effect of these images and metaphors and how they can be better communicated.

During the Zwarte Cross, a special test room was set up: the Dark Room. Here, visitors could give their opinion by viewing various climate images and filling in questionnaires about the emotions and associations that the images evoked for them. In addition, they participated in a Q-sort test, in which they had to rank the images based on their relevance to climate change. A total of 460 responses were collected.

The first results show that there are mixed feelings about the use of these types of images. Although some visitors indicated that they would be interested in articles that are linked to certain images, others responded less positively. The results are being further analyzed to draw further conclusions.