A Brush With Climate

The Project

A Brush With Climate utilises UCC’s expertise in climate change and communications and The Environmental Forum’s experience of engaging the local community climate action. Through a series of co-creation workshops held in 2025, the project has cocreated resources to support hairstylists to have conversations about climate change with their clients and to inspire climate action. The project has also delivered climate training to hairstylists, covering themes such as climate impacts, climate action, and myth-busting

The Objective

A Brush With Climate utilises UCC’s expertise in climate change and communications and The Environmental Forum’s experience of engaging the local community climate action. Through a series of co-creation workshops held in 2025, the project has cocreated resources to support hairstylists to have conversations about climate change with their clients and to inspire climate action. The project has also delivered climate training to hairstylists, covering themes such as climate impacts, climate action, and myth-busting.

Our Role

The Environmental Forum’s core role was to recruit the participating salons and stylists for the project and get them bought in to the goals and objectives. Throughout the duration of the project we served as a point of contact with the stylists as well as meeting with them to get their feedback and ideas its development as co-creation was key to the projects success. While we were the experts in environmentalism, they were the experts in communication and proved to be invaluable assets in designing this and future iterations of the project.

The Results

‘A Brush With Climate’ has co-created a suite of resources which are designed to support hairstylists to talk about climate change in an accessible and fun way with their clients, with the goal of inspiring their clients to take tangible actions. These resources include:

Climate Bingo Cards – These cards invite a client to imagine what would happen if they implemented a climate action in their everyday life. Each card has a “What if?” question on the front, followed by an action – for example: “What if… I tried to reduce my energy and electricity usage at home?” – on the flipside of the card is a QR code which leads to a Linktree packed full of answers to each question. There are 20 cards in the deck, with questions covering a range of themes: energy, transport, fast fashion, activism, food waste, and more!

Linktree – This Linktree page answers all of the “What if?” questions on the Climate Bingo Cards – each link leads to more information and resources about how to do any of the actions your client chooses.

Mirror stickers – These stickers are an eye catching and easy way to start a conversation about climate action – each sticker has a different fact about climate change and a QR code to the Linktree. Perfect way to start a conversation – your client can be already thinking about climate action while waiting in their chair! The stickers are printed on static cling material which means that no glue residue is left behind on your mirror.

Climate Info Card – These small cards are designed to support you to answer questions you might get about climate change – the cards come with key information like impactful actions, causes of climate change, impacts on Ireland, and trustworthy sources of information.

Click on any of the resources above to download your own PDF copy, or else you can order your own free copy HERE

We learned a lot working with the hairstylists on this project. They are the experts in communication, every day chat – the influence of which we underestimate. Communicating the Climate Crisis has never been more important and we cannot afford to npt explore every possible avenue and opporutnity to get through to the people. Hair Stylists are people we trust, strangers that we can grow to have quite a personal relationship with. What we discovered in working on this project is that they are an under utilised resource in our society – 1 in 100 people works in the hair care industry and they can be a great aid in communicating serious issues to the public. Small Talk, Big Change.