Facts were never
the whole story.
A tool for the moment before publishing: scan a draft against six narrative moves, score it against five dimensions, and fix what would have failed, before anyone reads it.
Why correct information fails to move us
Two decades of research converge on a compact set of reasons factual climate messaging stalls. Stoknes (2014) names five. The framework treats them as symptoms to design against, not audience failings to scold.
The Planetary Health Check
The study diagnosed one real, publicly available artefact: the Planetary Health Check 2025 and its public-facing materials, produced by Planetary Boundaries Science at the Potsdam Institute with the Planetary Guardians. It is the strongest available attempt to speak about Earth-system science in a health register, which is exactly why its communication choices repay close reading. The finding, in one line: a competent informational object that fails relationally. Clear, confident, visually literate, and lowest exactly where the reader is supposed to become an actor.
The codebook, at a glance
Twenty-three codes applied in a single pass, so what the artefact does well is recorded with the same effort as what it does poorly. Every code carries a definition, a tagging rule, and a source basis; every assignment carries a quoted extract.
Failure modes
what the literature shows going wrongDesign principles
what the practitioner literature says worksPlanetary-health dimensions
what planetary health contributesHow a passage gets coded
This is the artefact's own launch post for PHC 2025, exactly as coded in the study's record. Toggle a code family to see where each code landed and why.
Coded excerpt: the launch post, as published
Last Wednesday, we launched the Planetary Health Check 2025! FM-01 information deficitThe findings are urgent: FM-08 moral disengagementseven of Earth's nine Planetary Boundaries are now breached. DP-01 be confidentFor the first time, the Ocean Acidification boundary has tipped over, PH-2 relational thinkingputting coral reefs, fisheries, and even the oxygen we breathe at risk. FM-03 doom and fear framingOur planet's vital signs are flashing red! It's time to draw the line for Planetary Boundaries. FM-01 information deficitRead more 👉
What planetary health makes communicable
Planetary health relocates environmental change from the register of ecological loss to the register of human wellbeing. The framework turns that into five design dimensions, each answering something the diagnostic found missing or misused, each built from the coding frame. Frozen in August 2026; applied, not revised, since.
People are the subject, not the colour.
Human health and wellbeing is what the claim is about, with the planetary science in support. Clinical vocabulary that only decorates the alarm does not count.
Land the claim in a lived day.
Claims arrive in a place, a season, a body, a working day, and the reader's own position in the system is stated rather than implied.
Say who bears it, and why.
Who is harmed and who causes it is named with particularity, in the affected people's own voice where possible. Fairness shown, never assumed.
Let someone they know say it.
Messengers the audience recognises as its own carry part of the argument. A voice quoted between sections is decoration; a voice delivering the claim is design.
Leave one door open, and point to it.
Every piece leaves the reader one named, evidenced, joinable route, scaled to them. Download, subscribe and share are attention, not participation.
Six moves, in order
The dimensions become a sequence a communicator can follow when drafting. Two moves keep what the diagnosed artefact already did well; four supply what it missed.
Open on people, well or unwell
The first claim is about human health, lives or wellbeing. The stake, stated before the science.
cue: what does this mean for someone's life? Say that first.Place it
Locate the claim here and now: a place, a season, a body, a working day. Proximity before magnitude.
cue: this year, this street, this harvest. Not the globe, not 2100.Say what is known, plainly
State the settled finding confidently, translated, with a visual that works without its caption.
cue: lead with what you know. Translate in the same sentence.Name who acts and who bears
Agents are nameable; affected people are particular, and speak where possible. No harm without a hand, no victim as a statistic.
cue: not "human activities". Who, doing what, to whom.Lay down the path
One collective, evidenced, joinable route, scaled to the reader. Not download, subscribe, contact.
cue: something the reader could start this week, where they already are.Close on hope under way
Honest severity paired with a response already moving, in a line the reader could repeat to someone else.
cue: the ozone layer healed because people acted. End on the door, open.
Review a draft before it goes out
This is what the framework is for: the moment before publishing. Paste a draft, scan it against the six moves, then score it against the five dimensions with the same frozen instrument the study's pilot used. Everything runs on this page; nothing you paste is sent anywhere.
Scan the draft against the six moves
An indicative surface scan: for each move, it looks for language that suggests the move is being made, and language that suggests the documented failure instead. It gathers evidence to weigh; it does not judge.
Score the draft on the five dimensions
Whole numbers, 1 to 5, against the written anchors. The rule the study kept: no level is claimed without a passage of your own text that earns it, and a draft caught between two levels takes the lower.
Why no total: the five scores are never added up. An average would hide the one thing you need to see, the weakest dimension, and that is where the redraft starts. Anchors condensed from the frozen descriptors (August 2026).
The framework, applied
The study reframed the artefact's launch post with the six moves, using only material from within the artefact, then scored both versions against both frozen instruments. What follows is the actual record: real texts, real scores.
The original post, captured from LinkedIn. Click it to open the post itself.
Stated at the outset, not conceded at the end
The story is not over.
That is the point.
Communication that positions people inside a living system gives them something no threshold chart can: a part to play in how it turns out.