With the end of the year comes the inevitable influx of Christmas-themed charity appeals - needy children's wish lists, fundraisers and requests for donations to any number of organisations. After spending some time or money on a cause, however, people become somewhat immune, and a similar pattern is emerging when it comes to climate change.
“It isn't about making people care, it's about making them care enough to act.”
Lezette Engelbrecht
As the sense of weariness surrounding COP17 grows, people seem to be responding either with despair or indifference. For some, climate change is the unequivocal challenge of our time; for others, it's just another item in a long list of problems facing humanity, and one that is too big and complex to warrant their time or contribution.
A recent Climate Communications Day event held on the sidelines of the COP17 conference stressed that communicators need to find new ways of conveying climate change messages.
In the face of what can easily seem like an insurmountable challenge, the overwhelming focus has been on the problems - the catastrophic effects on ecosystems, weather, agriculture, and water supply; the difficulties in reaching global targets, restructuring the energy industry, and devising finance mechanisms. This focus has been important in getting the public's attention and driving home the gravity of the threat. But it hasn't left people with any sense of empowerment.
So media and other communicators changed tack - they realised that a report about an individual's battle was far more compelling than one about the faceless masses. It's an old tactic: “humanising” a story, giving it a face. But if this approach breaks through the wall of apathy confronting humanitarian disasters, then arguments that it reduces complex topics to simplistic sentimentalism fall short.
Fundamentally, it isn't about making people care, it's about making them care enough to act. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof explains in Advice for saving the world, people get involved not due to the direness of circumstances but when they are emotionally buoyed through a tale of triumph and hope. It's the feel-good factor of knowing your contribution will actually make a difference.
This argument was supported by the journalists on the panel who had experienced this first-hand. They revealed that the climate change stories which got the most feedback were related to doing something practical that resonated with readers. A short piece on how much one could save by air drying instead of tumble drying jeans generated hundreds of responses. Another journalist's article on how she was trying to “green” her home brought in far more e-mails than the tales of climate-related devastation or high-level conferences.
Making plans
Fortunately, the broader climate narrative has many hopeful stories to offer. The ways people are applying their minds to the problem are inspirational in their diversity. Researchers and innovators are busy working on new technologies, individuals are lowering their own footprint in small but meaningful ways, and communities in rural settings are using intricate knowledge of their surroundings to prepare and adapt to changes.
In many cases, those who are the least responsible for global emissions levels are spearheading response initiatives. In the south Indian state Tamil Nadu, for example, a series of villages lie along two rivers which frequently unleash a torrent of water when the monsoon rains come.
With extreme weather likely to become more frequent as a result of climate change, flooding could become catastrophic, and women in the village are leading the charge in preparing for risks. They are learning and teaching others how to swim and perform rescues, storing life jackets and makeshift rafts, and securing their surroundings against flooding, as well as educating others on how to get and offer help.
In many cases, what enables such initiatives to function is effective communication - an area where ICT could greatly support and improve efficiency. Often real-time, geographically-based information is key to response and adaptation efforts, and even in small villages the rapid transfer of data can have a huge impact.
It also plays an important role in the engagement and collaboration that makes projects run, as well as managing smaller groups spread over various areas. It fosters dialogue and collective brainstorming through virtual platforms, access to learning resources, and the social interaction needed to cope with change. It could be as simple as a few mobile phones or an Internet connection, but it could turn an initial idea into one of the uplifting stories that spurs others to act.
It's been a tough year for those trying to get climate change higher on the global priority list. Competing crises like the economic meltdown and upheaval in the Middle East have shoved aside issues of environmental catastrophe, all while headlines reflected a growing trend towards climate-related disasters - sudden and long-term.
To keep people engaged in an issue that affects our collective future will require a significant shift in the way it is communicated, and ICTs ranging from data capture to social media can aid in this, especially at ground level. But the fundamental change will have to come in the broader focus, the portrayal of stories that convey individual success rather than collective misery. It will require a shift towards promoting behaviour that even a saintly Mother Teresa recognised: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
Here's to a year of acknowledging numerous personal changes, and their effect on a much larger social climate.
Share