Worst-case Scenario: An Analysis of the World Wildlife Fund's "regenerate Canada" Campaign

This MRP provides an analysis of the environmental communication approach established in the "Regenerate Canada" campaign by the World Wildlife Fund Canada, in an attempt to better understand the role of emotional appeals in environmental communication. By examining the major ten-year environmental campaign motivated by a "code red" (IPCC, 2021) for nature and humanity declared by the United Nations (UN) in 2021, this study examines the narratives used in environmental communication as a response to the ongoing climate crisis. Throughout 10 separate webpages and 295 sentences communicating the campaign - as well as the context of prevalent environmental reports - campaign content was coded and evaluated through emotional appeals. By doing so, this MRP contributes to the study of emotional appeals used in environmental and science communication. The findings show that WWF-Canada mainly adapted a neutral, informal tone. While much of the campaign still relies on neutral messaging to communicate facts, appeals to emotions are present throughout the Regenerate Canada campaign, both in the form of fearful and hopeful messaging. Hope based messaging appeared more often than fear or apocalyptic messaging. In the case of textual content, this amounted to 61.9% of the emotionally charged messaging being hopeful. Another important distinction is the order of these two distinct appeals. Across the campaign, hopeful messaging appears only after a fearful frame has been established.