Climate change is certainly not the easiest topic in science communication, as I have learned since I started practising this discipline. Communicators aiming to engage people about the climate crisis must address participants who are experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions. Anxiety, fear, anger, grief, plus an impending sense of doom. These same emotions are shared by communicators too. It is challenging to lift participants and ourselves out of this low mood and feel hopeful, empowered, and ready to act. Hard, but not impossible.
Serious games have been explored for years as a strategy to engage people in learning without the typical barriers of formal education. One example of a gamification approach in climate science communication is Climate Fresk: a 3-hour collaborative game based on the IPCC reports and created in France in 2015. Since then, the activity has spread to many countries, including the UK, with more than 2 million participants worldwide.
The activity is structured into four phases (reasoning, creativity, review, and debrief), using gamification to boost learning and empower the participants to embrace sustainable and climate-friendly practices. Participants are provided with cards on the causes and effects of climate change and must arrange them on a table in a cause-and-effect order. They are encouraged to be creative and acknowledge their emotions. After the game, they gather to share and discuss how to put what they felt and learned into practice.
The participants are not alone in this journey. They are guided and supported by facilitators (known as “freskers“), former participants who have undergone training to become part of the backbone community of Climate Fresk. There are currently more than 100,000 freskers worldwide, and they are generally not climate scientists themselves. Depending on their level of expertise, the facilitators run workshops in person and online across many settings (general public, schools, universities, businesses), either as volunteers or professionals.
Despite its solid structure and clear objectives, it is not straightforward to assess whether attending a CF workshop has an impact on the participants. The CF organisation also lacks a systematic way to assess its activities. This is when evaluation enters the chat. As part of my dissertation for the MSc Science Communication at UWE Bristol, Margarida Sardo and I planned to evaluate the impact of Climate Fresk on the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours towards climate change of both participants and facilitators, by using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods (observation, interview, and surveys).
We first focused on the participants of two workshops targeted at the general public. From our observation of the participants during the activity, they showed interest and engagement in the game and shared their emotions, which were generally quite low at some point. No need to despair though: after the game, participants discussed meaningful ways to contribute to climate action and sustainability, which also improved the overall mood. The topics they mentioned included both individual actions (changing diet, travelling sustainably, green investments) and collective action (political and economic engagement).
A few participants also agreed to be interviewed individually a week after the workshop. The aim was to obtain a first-hand account of how they experienced the activity and whether it affected them. The transcripts were analysed to identify common themes and patterns in the answers, based on the Generic Learning Outcomes. The results were mixed. The participants liked the activity and its collaborative nature, and also reported increased knowledge of climate change, especially the ability to see the bigger picture of the climate crisis. However, they also claimed the activity simply reinforced their previous beliefs about solutions to the climate crisis. They also felt their sense of agency on the matter did not change.
There are many potential reasons behind these contrasting results. All participants interviewed already had a high degree of climate awareness before attending the activity; in a sense, it was a bit like preaching to the choir. This self-selection produced a highly knowledgeable, already‑committed cohort of participants, reducing the potential for measurable change. Furthermore, it is unrealistic to expect a 3-hour activity to produce a lasting attitude and behavioural shift on such a complex issue. In this case, greater knowledge did not lead to greater empowerment, but that might not be true in settings with no participants self-selection.
Given the long-term impact of the activity on participants, we could not measure it after just a week, so Margarida and I designed a survey to engage the UK facilitators community, with both quantitative and qualitative questions about their facilitation experience, motivations to keep facilitating, what climate action they implemented as a result of CF, and the role of the organisation in their commitment to sustainability. Our goal was to assess whether CF can foster sustained action among that audience. It turns out it does, but indirectly.
Belonging is the game changer. Of the 38 respondents, around 90% reported that being part of the facilitators community was a source of inspiration and commitment to climate action and sustainability, including ethical banking investments, political activism, and systemic shifts in their professional work environments. Facilitating workshops also provided many freskers with a sense of purpose. However, some respondents aligned their answers with the deficit model (educating or informing the public) rather than a truly engaging approach (a two-way discussion between facilitators and participants).
Our findings suggest that climate communication initiatives may achieve their greatest impact not simply by increasing knowledge, but by creating spaces where people can reflect together, support one another, and sustain their commitment to action over time.
The CF organisation has come a long way in demonstrating the impact of serious games in climate change communication. To improve its outcomes, the activity should focus less on imparting knowledge and more on providing practical advice, offering ongoing support, and building a community centred on shared commitment and continuous learning. The climate crisis certainly seems a daunting challenge, but we can count on the friends we make along the way.
By Giorgio Graffino, MSc Science Communication graduate (2026) at UWE Bristol. Communicating about climate, weather, and the environment. Fighting the climate crisis one content at a time.