Ads Showing How Climate Change Harms Kids to Air in Swing States

Emotional Ads Show How Climate Change Is ‘Robbing Our Kids of a Safe and Beautiful World’

The nonpartisan group Science Moms says its campaign of ads that show the harms that climate change brings to children is nonpartisan and meant to educate the public about climate impacts

By Adam Aton & E&E News

A child walks through flooded streets in the rural migrant worker town of Immokalee, which was especially hard hit by Hurricane Irma.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

CLIMATEWIRE | The effects of climate change on children will be the focus of a new $2.5 million ad campaign across six swing states.

Science Moms, a nonpartisan group started in 2021 by climate scientists, is launching the campaign to link global warming with “unnatural disasters” — floods, wildfires and other extreme weather — and emphasize their impacts on families.

“Climate sounds like a big, intractable problem. But actually, protecting our kids is so much more personal and so much more relevant to right now and the choices we make,” said Joellen Russell, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona.

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“Unnatural disasters caused by climate change are destroying the places we love and robbing our kids of a safe and beautiful world that they deserve,” she said. “They are permanently changing the shape of our children’s memories — of the things we had as children that we can’t, because it’s not available, give to our own kids.”

Russell co-founded Science Moms with Texas Tech University Professor Katharine Hayhoe, Columbia University Professor Ruth DeFries and other climate researchers to raise the salience of climate change among the public.

The group initially sought to target mothers, Russell said, but over the past three years it has focused on families “because we’re all worried about our kids.”

The 60-second ad “The Last Time” narrates how climate impacts like wildfires and flooding promise to reshape childhood milestones.

“If you knew this was your last trip to your favorite family camp spot before it went away, how would you spend it?” a narrator asks, before cutting to news clips of recent wildfires and floods. “If you knew this was your last, best chance to protect the places you love, what would you do?”

The ad is slated to run through Sept. 30 in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia. It will run on TV and radio stations, streaming services like Hulu and Max, as well as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and elsewhere online.

Those states will be key to the campaign for control of the White House and Senate. But the leaders of Science Moms say their goal is to educate the public about a dire threat to their health and safety. The group has also run ads in states like California in non-election years.

“We need all hands on deck. This isn’t really something I want to talk about with just one party,” Russell said.

Science Moms is a nonprofit that does not disclose its donors, but it has previously said it’s received funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Grantham Foundation, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott and former Nature Conservancy chief executive Mark Tercek.

Science Moms is a campaign of the climate-focused ad agency Potential Energy Coalition.

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