Jeremy Clarkson is probably not the first person you would choose to front a campaign on climate change. He’s probably not even in the top 100.
For much of his career, he has mocked environmentalists, questioned climate science and made a very good living driving extremely powerful cars extremely quickly.
Then, in 2019, he started farming.
You will know this if you haven’t been living under a rock. Clarkson’s Farm has become one of Amazon’s biggest shows. The joke was initially Clarkson himself: wealthy television presenter buys enormous machinery, assumes farming will be straightforward and discovers he knows almost nothing about it.
TV gold. I watched it obsessively.
But across four seasons, something more interesting has happened.
Clarkson has dealt with flooding, drought, changing seasons, soil quality, disease, biodiversity and the extraordinary sensitivity of food production to weather. His language around climate change has shifted too. He has acknowledged that the climate is changing and talked about what it means for farming.
I’ve found myself using him as something of a poster boy in our climate behaviour studies…at least in my mind, I’m not brave enough to write him in!
Not because Clarkson has spent the past few years attending climate workshops or mingling at COP summits. He has spent them trying to run a farm.
I think that matters, and it makes a different difference.
We keep treating climate change as a communications problem
A lot of behaviour-change activity still starts from a familiar assumption:
If people understood the problem better, they would behave differently.
Gah. It’s all sense and no feeling.
So we tell people how much carbon their flight produces. We put energy ratings on appliances. We explain biodiversity loss. We publish sustainability reports and run campaigns about food waste, recycling and net zero.
Some of this is useful. But knowing something doesn’t necessarily make it important to you. Feelings are where it is at – just ask the marketers making you buy stuff you don’t need…they will tell you!
Climate change has a particular problem here. It is enormous but often distant from everyday life, and the effect of any one person’s behaviour is almost impossible to see.
Farming changes that. It gets climate change right up in your face. Eyeballing you. It’s so tangible you can taste it. There is no boiling the frog mentality here….farmers know we are ‘cooked’.
Rain is no longer something that ruins your weekend plans. It determines whether you can get machinery onto a field. Temperature affects when crops grow…or fail. Soil affects productivity. Insects become pollinators or pests. A few weeks of unusual weather can change the economics of your entire year.
This fits neatly with Construal Level Theory. Trope and Liberman’s work on psychological distance suggests that distant things tend to be thought about more abstractly, while closer experiences become more concrete.¹
A projection about rainfall in 2050 is one thing. A field you can’t plant because it has been underwater for weeks, so you have lost £30k through no fault of your own, is quite another.
We can see this beyond Clarkson
We have some useful evidence of this at Grounded.
In 2025, Grounded Research spoke to 300 UK farmers for the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) about extreme weather and climate change.
98% had experienced extreme weather in the previous five years. 86% had experienced extreme rainfall, 78% drought and 54% heatwaves.
The consequences were equally striking. 87% reported reduced productivity, 84% reduced crop or livestock output and 74% financial losses.
For these farmers, climate isn’t happening somewhere else. It’s showing up in their fields, yields and where it really hurts – bank accounts.
There is an availability heuristic point here too. Tversky and Kahneman showed how judgements can be influenced by how readily relevant examples come to mind.² A farmer who has experienced a flooded field, failed crop or drought has a rather different set of examples available when thinking about climate risk.
That doesn’t mean experiencing bad weather automatically creates belief in climate change. Attribution still matters. But proximity changes the context in which climate information lands.
Then there’s identity
Clarkson didn’t just learn about agriculture at a distance or with theory. He became a farmer.
Identity-Based Motivation describes how our identities shape which behaviours feel relevant and appropriate to us.³ This is particularly interesting for sustainability because environmental behaviours have accumulated plenty of what we might recognise as ‘cultural baggage’ like aspirations, alignment with popular brand ambassadors, how people percieve you based on the things you own, the actions you take etc, etc.
this is ssomething that becomes less important the closer to the problem you get.
You don’t have to become an environmentalist to care about soil. You can care because good soil makes you a better farmer.
You don’t need to become a biodiversity campaigner to value insects. Your livelihood may depend on pollination.
Could you have imagined the former Top Gear presenter near to tears about the plight of skylarks five years ago?
The behaviour can look the same from the outside while the motivation is completely different.
Our farmer research backs up the importance of action here. More than two thirds had changed how they farmed in response to extreme weather linked to climate change, including changing what they farm, joining environmental schemes and diversifying. More than 80% were concerned about climate change affecting their ability to make a living.
My dad is a farmer, and he’s becoming an environmentalist because of what he sees on the ground – less the socks and sandals.
It’s not proof that experience caused those changes. But Clarkson starts to look less like an eccentric celebrity example and more like a very visible version of something happening across British farming.
The environment doesn’t require motivational purity
This is the bit I think matters commercially.
We spend a lot of time trying to persuade people to share our reason for doing something.
Someone might install a heat pump because they care about carbon. Someone else might do it because it saves money. Someone else might simply want a better heating system.
The carbon doesn’t care.
Our farmers were similarly pragmatic. More than half agreed that addressing climate risk should be a priority for UK food security even if it meant changing how and what we farm. But two thirds also said better farmgate prices would give them more headroom for environmental work, while nearly 60% wanted greater long-term certainty around green farming schemes.
Environmental resilience and commercial resilience don’t have to be competing motivations and if we joined them up they stand a better chance of success and have a wider audience.
Good soil can be good for nature and good for business. Biodiversity can be environmentally valuable and make a farm more resilient.
For anyone designing behaviour-change programmes, that’s worth paying attention to.
Instead of asking only ‘how do we persuade people to care?’, we should be asking what the behaviour can do for something they already care about.
So, the Clarkson Effect?
I bet Jeremy would be pissed off if I called this the Clarkson Effect.
But what we are observing are some key ingredients (behavioural theories!) coming together to make a much tastier cake.
- Construal Level Theory: proximity makes an abstract problem more concrete.
- Availability heuristic: direct experience gives us examples that are easier to call to mind.
- Identity-Based Motivation: becoming a different kind of participant in a system changes which behaviours make sense for someone like us.
What is interesting about Clarkson is watching those things come together in public.
That’s what I’m calling the Clarkson Effect: getting closer to a system changes your relationship with it. The problem becomes more immediate, its consequences become harder to ignore and caring about it can start to fit with who you are.
We rely heavily on communications because communications are relatively easy. Make a campaign. Rewrite the message. Test a proposition. Ping it out. Job Done.
But sometimes the better intervention is to change the experience.
Make household energy loss visible. Let employees see the waste their site actually produces. Help communities notice the biodiversity disappearing – or returning – around them. Give people meaningful contact with where their food comes from. We know this works because we have examples of it – but they don’t have the comms budget to shout about it.
Turn the communication into an intervention and let the experience provide its own feedback.
So perhaps alongside asking:
What do people need to know?
we should ask:
What do people need to experience?
And, crucially:
How can the behaviour connect with something they already care about?
We may not need everyone to care more about climate change before they act differently, but we might need to bring climate change closer to the things they already care about.
References
Oyserman, D. (2009). Identity-Based Motivation: Implications for Action-Readiness, Procedural-Readiness, and Consumer Behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(3), 250–260.
Trope, Y. & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440–463.
Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2), 207–232.