SoMAS Grad Student Ponders the Intersection of Climate and Communications

Research shows that to drive real-world action, communication needs to be tailored to its targets. That means personalizing it to the audience, framing it around their existing values, and focusing on tangible, collective solutions.

Sydney Robinson, a second-year PhD student studying marine, atmospheric and sustainability sciences in Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS), is working to do exactly that. Her research involves community advisory boards and focus groups to understand communication barriers and effective messaging in the Jamaica Bay area of Queens, New York.

Robinson asks community members about their experiences and perceptions of the information they received around historic Superstorm Sandy. Jamaica Bay was one of the areas hardest hit by the storm in October 2012, enduring record-breaking storm surges that reached almost 12 feet, devastating adjacent coastal communities and inflicting severe ecological damage on the bay's fragile natural habitats.

"The goal is to conduct focus groups within the community and discuss how we as researchers can develop storylines to help with predictions of what storm surges can look like in the future," said Robinson. "Our role is to help communicate what those risks can be and get an understanding of what information they felt was missing during their previous experiences with floods. That's the bulk of figuring out what those communication barriers were, and what type of information they feel is most important."

Robinson describes her research as a mixture of both climate science and communications.

"I align myself more with the communications as I dig deeper," she said. "I situated myself in that communication, and specifically messaging and testing of messaging to see what is most digestible and impactful to people under different scenarios. This particular project addresses the question of what climate change looks like in Jamaica Bay."

Robinson, from Buffalo, New York, began her collegiate career at SUNY's University of Albany, where she studied environmental science with a concentration in geography. Throughout different projects, she was exposed to place attachment and questions of how and why people stay or leave areas - what makes people stay? What influences them? And how does messaging impact them?

"Another thing we've always talked about is people evacuating," she said. "There are other dimensions of why people evacuate, and that could come down to them just not getting the messaging or having the awareness to go at a specific time."

Robinson planned to pursue a master's in planning. "When I talked to a faculty member at Stony Brook, they encouraged me to apply for a PhD," she said. "I was hesitant, but I took the chance and got accepted. And now I'm doing things that I never thought I could do."

Robinson noted that when people hear the phrase 'climate change,' that may be the end of the conversation. "So coming at it through a different approach and maybe leading with the things they are most concerned about and adapting what you're going to say back can help you design a tactic to be more effective with different groups of people," she said.

To that end, Robinson intends to focus her dissertation on examining testimonial injustice in environmental policy communication.

"Every community and every person is different, therefore your approach has to be different," she said. "Climate change is a door opening because there is concern and awareness. But certain people may be more willing to listen to messaging that says 'extreme weather' rather than 'climate change,' for example. You have to listen and adapt your language. You may not unlock the things that move people if you put potential communication barriers in front of them."

After graduation, Robinson hopes to have a career in teaching, with an eye toward administration. She credits her advisor, Christine Gilbert, an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism and SoMAS, for being a big part of her academic success.

"She has really invested in me and unlocked a lot of questions and curiosity that I was thinking about but I wasn't sure was relevant," she said. "Communication is new to me and she's definitely helped me with developing experimental messaging testing. She's poured a lot into me and she has been a really strong foundation."

"Sydney is an excellent representation of what a climate change researcher often looks like - someone who doesn't come from one discipline, but has interests that span multiple disciplinary fields," said Gilbert. "Despite having no communication research training, Sydney was able to quickly learn 'on the job' during data collection for a project I ran in the summer of 2025 focused on invasive species communication. Her curiosity is her greatest asset."

Robinson received both the Maze-Landeau and Bridge to the Doctorate Fellowships in 2024. The Maze-Landeau Graduate Student Award is a travel award for SoMAS students intended to help full-time graduate students participate and present a paper or a poster at a national or international professional society meeting. Stony Brook University's Bridge to the Doctorate program is an NSF-funded fellowship for underrepresented minority students in STEM fields.

In addition to applying the communication she hopes to develop, adaptation has also been a central theme in her own academic journey.

"Since I've been here, I've been able to explore opportunities and learn more about communication research," she said. "Everything just kind of just fell together and I'm really grateful for that. It definitely wasn't the plan that I started with, but this path was the best that could have happened."

- Robert Emproto