Reports

How to Talk About Climate Change: A Toolkit for Encouraging Collective Action

July 31, 2019

This toolkit discusses effective communication strategies that inspire hope, build connections, develop understandings and encourage collective action.

For those working on achieving meaningful action about climate change, locally and internationally, effective communications can create hope, improve people’s understanding of the causes and solutions, open doors to collaboration between people, business and politicians, and motivate people to act in meaningful ways, to be agents of change. We can inspire our children, show them all that is possible when adults come together to work on understanding the problems, and building better systems for them and their children and the planet we live in partnership with.

Our communications must therefore have a sound evidential basis. We need to know they will be effective, ethical and have an impact in helpful ways. Mainstream climate communication has, to date, focussed heavily on fear, economic impacts, and led with facts. And while climate change is alarming, urgent, has significant economic repercussions, and requires people to think productively about the causes and solutions, inspiring action at the right level requires more than communicating the facts and the dangers. We need strategies grounded in the evidence of persuasive communication: the science of story.

This toolkit is to help us use strategies that inspire hope, build connections between people, open doors to people developing more productive understandings of the causes of climate change, and encourages collective action on evidence-informed solutions, across local and international settings. We have drawn on many disciplines from cognitive psychology, implementation science through to cognitive linguistics. The science of story takes us beyond repetition of the facts and framing of fears, and into the realms of storytelling with science.

How To Talk About Climate Change – The Workshop & Oxfam NZ 2019.PDF
Literature Review: Effective Climate Change Communications – The Workshop & Oxfam NZ 2019.PDF

Oxfam’s 5-Point Plan to Build a Fairer Global Tax System

July 29, 2019

Endless corporate tax scandals?

When multinational corporations and the super-rich use tax havens to avoid paying their fair share, it is ordinary people, and especially the poorest, who pay the price. The Mauritius Leaks show that tax havens continue not only to exist but to prosper, despite government promises to rein in tax dodging. This briefing lists five steps governments can take to tackle tax avoidance, and end the era of tax havens and the race to the bottom on corporate taxation.

Oxfam’s 5-Point Plan to Build a Fairer Global Tax System.PDF

Public Good or Private Wealth?

January 21, 2019

Our economy is broken, with hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty while huge rewards go to those at the very top.

Universal health, education and other public services reduce the gap between rich and poor, and between genders. Fairer taxation of the wealthiest can help pay for them.

Read our report ‘Public Good or Private Wealth?’ to learn how we can achieve this.
See the report’s methodology here.

The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2018

October 9, 2018

In 2015, the leaders of 193 governments promised to reduce inequality under Goal 10 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Without reducing inequality, meeting SDG 1 to eliminate poverty will be impossible. In 2017, Development Finance International (DFI) and Oxfam produced the first index to measure the commitment of governments to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. The index is based on a new database of indicators, now covering 157 countries, which measures government action on social spending, tax and labour rights – three areas found to be critical to reducing the gap.

This second edition of the Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) Index finds that countries such as South Korea, Namibia and Uruguay are taking strong steps to reduce inequality. Sadly, countries such as India and Nigeria do very badly overall, as does the USA among rich countries, showing a lack of commitment to closing the inequality gap.

The report recommends that all countries should develop national inequality action plans to achieve SDG 10 on reducing inequality. These plans should include delivery of universal, public and free health and education and universal social protection floors. They should be funded by increasing progressive taxation and clamping down on exemptions and tax dodging. Countries must also respect union rights and make women’s rights at work comprehensive, and they should raise minimum wages to living wages.

The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2018 – Summary.PDF
The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2018 – Full Report.PDF
The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2018 – Methodology.PDF

Prescription for Poverty

September 18, 2018

New Oxfam research shows that four pharmaceutical corporations—Abbott, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co. (also known as MSD), and Pfizer—systematically stash their profits in overseas tax havens.

They appear to deprive developing countries of more than NZ$150 million every year—money that is urgently needed to meet the health needs of people in these countries—while vastly overcharging for their products. It is estimated that New Zealand loses NZ$21 million every year.

Read full report here.

Ripe For Change

June 25, 2018

Inequality is rampant across the global economy, and the agro-food sector is no exception.

At the top, big supermarkets and other corporate food giants dominate global food markets, allowing them to squeeze value from vast supply chains that span the globe, while at the bottom the bargaining power of small-scale farmers and workers has been steadily eroded in many of the countries from which they source.

The result is widespread human suffering among the women and men producing food for supermarkets around the world. From forced labour aboard fishing vessels in Southeast Asia, to poverty wages on Indian tea plantations and hunger faced by workers on South African grape farms, human and labour rights abuses are all too common in food supply chains.

In an era of gross global inequality and escalating climate change, this business model is increasingly unsustainable. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Governments, food companies, small-scale farmers and workers, and citizens around the world can all help to rebalance power in food supply chains and ensure they more fairly reward those producing our food. The supermarket sector is ripe for change.

There is no justifiable reason that the human and labour rights of women and men supplying supermarkets cannot be respected. There is no moral excuse for anyone producing our food to go hungry. This report launches Oxfam’s new campaign to expose the root causes behind human suffering in food supply chains and to mobilise the power of people around the world to help end it, starting with a focus on the role of supermarkets.

Download file:

Ripe For Change – Oxfam 2018 – Summary.pdf

Ripe For Change – Oxfam 2018 – Full Report.pdf

Ripe For Change – Oxfam 2018 – Methodology.pdf