Public relations and climate change impacts: developing a collaborative response

Global climate change effects pose problems both for community development professionals concerned with strengthening communities and for public relations practitioners confronting communication challenges. This paper suggests that each discipline has something to offer the other in dealing with communities facing climate change impacts. Collaboration between them could help implement the vision of public relations-as-community-building several scholars have advocated over the past two decades. Creating such a linkage would entail significant adjustments, especially for public relations. Yet over time, there could be a payoff in greater social and symbolic capital. Two scenarios discuss how joint public relations-community development approaches could work.