Messaging on a clear and present danger
“The climate emergency is the biggest crisis we face as a society. The consequences of not meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement — the global framework to mitigate the most dangerous impacts of climate change — are projected to be devastating.” – Edelman
Given the vast scale of climate change and the devastation, what is the correct approach to communicate it to an audience, for it to be understood in a viable way?
The answer to this is as bewildering as the question itself.
Even though many prescriptive approaches could be accessed online (and from countless other discussion for a) on how to communicate climate change, the steps prescribed need to be studied first with a grasp of the scale of the issue at hand. The steps shown in these approaches need to be followed carefully while adapting to the changing responses from the audience. Any communicator who
implements climate change communications need to verify if the chosen approach ‘is what would work’ in their locale since expected outcomes from a given communication approach would vary across differing geo-locations and diverse audiences. The communicator may be compelled to realize that
initial test-communications may need to be done with the target audience for later comms’ effectiveness.
Even if the tests are successful, unravelling the complexity of communications is vital in climate change messaging. They invariably pack scientific findings. The interpretations on results of climate change scientific studies need to be analyzed and communicated well to the target audiences in a way that persuades the general public to take the issue ever seriously.
UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change announced in April its guidance on “what the world can do to avoid an extremely dangerous future”. According to the report, the world “will still warm by 3.2C this century” even if all the recommended practices to reduce CO2 are put to effect. Still even prior to the report’s release, the disagreements over interpretations of the research findings had to be settled first. The findings stressed the need for stopping greenhouse gas emissions immediately. Still a statement in the report was mistakenly interpreted. The statement was “greenhouse gases are projected to peak at the latest before 2025.” This was interpreted as “carbon could still be allowed to increase for another three years and the world could still avoid dangerous warming” (BBC). In fact, the report was trying to voice the need for
“stopping carbon emissions immediately.” Then why 2025? That year was mentioned by the report due to the climate change assessments and projections are made by the research team in blocks of 5-years (Eg: 2020, ’25. ‘30 etc).!
This is one example of the complexities that climate change communications face even at highest, intergovernmental / inter-agency levels; representing scientific data to draw a clear picture of what is
actually emerging.
Another complexity in this communications is the unbelievable but wildly fluctuating and changing people’s perception of climate change. This in fact has become one of the most challenging issues that the climate change communicators face. The general public appear to believe and worry about “the
problem of climate change and its effects one day”, but discard the threat promptly the next day, adopting a totally different belief.
The Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), is an “interdisciplinary center that studies individual and group decision making under climate uncertainty and decision making in the face of environmental risk.” In one of their important public opinion polls, CRED found that the swift change of
belief on climate change to be a shocking finding.
How? www.sciencedaily.com reports.
“In three separate studies, researchers affiliated with CRED surveyed about 1,200 people in the United States and Australia, and found that those who thought the current day was warmer than usual were more likely to believe in and feel concern about global warming than those who thought the day was unusually cold…Global warming is so complex, it appears some people are ready to be persuaded by whether their own day is warmer or cooler than usual, rather than think about whether the entire world is becoming warmer or cooler…It is striking that society has spent so much money, time and effort educating people about this issue, yet people are still so easily influenced… The (CRED) study says that “these results join a growing body of work (that) show that irrelevant environmental information, such as the current weather, can affect judgments!”
Not only on scientifically analyzed data, even scientific projections on it are fraught with possible disbelief by the audience.
“Despite the fact that 97% of climate science papers agree global warming is man-made, they do not have 100% confidence in their climate change projections—and they never will. As such, climate change has been a challenge for the scientific community, the media and organizations that are fighting climate change..” – From empower. Agency- “How to effectively communicate
about climate change”
Climate change is so complex, even communicating about it is such a vexed exercise.
What steps are to be followed in a climate change communication effort then?
(To Be Continued).
