Download Listening to citizens on climate change

Listening to Citizens: Politics of Engagement
in Climate Change Interventions
Juan F. Salazar
University of Western Sydney
A Climate for Change
Federal Parliamentary briefing, 21 March 2011
Hot Science, Global Citizens:
The agency of the museum sector in climate change communication
It is evident that we live in times of uncertainty about the consequences of climate change. In
this brief presentation I’d like to highlight the importance of participatory communication
mechanisms through which a politics of engagement around climate change can be imagined
and put in to practice.
As a mode of example: 3 recent case studies:
•A survey commissioned by the Royal Society, Britain’s leading scientific organisation found
that only 39 per cent of 1,001 respondents agreed with the statement “the media present
science in a responsible way”.
•The CSIRO survey conducted in 2010 before last year's federal election, perhaps Australia’s
largest survey on climate change views, showed that more than 90% of Australians believe
the climate is changing, yet only 50 per cent believe it's because of human carbon pollution,
while 40 per cent believe it's natural variability. 6% deny any climate change at all.
•Survey conducted at UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun 2010 with several thousand
respondents from 80 countries: Among its key findings:
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That Lack of Public Understanding is a Major Obstacle Inhibiting Action on Climate Change
A climate-movement at the ground level is needed to put pressure on politicians
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Dealing with Climate Uncertainties requires Political Leadership
Uncertainty and the media
In this crisis of uncertainties, the mass media hold a pivotal role in public understandings of
climate change. One simple reason: The media constitute the main source of information and
a most determining factor in the degree of awareness, concern and conscientisation by
citizens about climate change.
In recent years, social research worldwide has underlined how the commercial mass media
frames and presents environmental change and risk in ways that become contested cultural
constructs embedded in deep ideological structures.
The media operates increasingly as an important intersection/interface between science and
civil society, acting as a frame/filter of scientific knowledge on climate change matters.
A wide range of studies surveyed around the world show that news media map, or frame,
certain preferred discourses of environmental risks over others. Media rarely report on local
climate change issues and activities, focusing on international recycled information rarely
mentioning local research.
The framing of climate change in the mass media too often reinforces the uncertainty of
climate change, casting not only doubts on the science of climate change but also posing
reservations on the economic costs of taking action. In different degrees depending on the
outlet, the media too often give shelter to marginal positions that lie outside the scientific
consensus in a proportion way bigger than their academic weight.
Information vs. Communication:
Premise: Informed Citizens is key for understanding climate change action. Yet
more information about climate change does not necessarily lead to action nor
increased public engagement.
Alfonso Gumucio Dagron: Making Waves, 2001
•Information: one-way diffusion of messages and transfer of knowledge.
•Communication: a dialogic process of knowledge exchange.
•A communication for social change approach underlines that fighting Climate Change
needs not only independent reporting and well-informed media, but citizens’ media. Not
just one-off campaigns but long-term processes. Learning how to cope with climate
change in Sydney may not be transferable to another city or rural community in Australia
or another country.
• Local media have a crucial role to play beyond disseminating information. This is
particularly important when considering the existing information gaps between global and
local levels. There is more information on global processes of climate change but much
weaker information at a local level, where the actors in climate change adaptation are.
Listening to Citizens: Community Media & Museums
We see community media, on the one hand, and the museum sector on the other, as
important in filling the gaps left by mainstream mass information media in an effective
communication of climate change that may lead to a deeper understanding and action.
More Australians than ever are listening to community radio as demonstrated by the 2007
Community Media Matters report, a ground-breaking study of listeners of community radio
conducted by Griffith University [which includes Indigenous and Ethnic community radio, and
community television].
The report showed there is a growing audience with an estimated monthly national radio
audience reach of more than 9.5 million (57% of Australians aged 15+) and national television
audience reach of 3.7 million. 82% of long-term licensed community radio and television
services are located in regional, rural and remote areas, making it the largest independent
media sector, contributing over $420m. per annum to the Australian economy and producing
over 46,000 program hours per week of which just over 77% is locally produced.
So a key challenge is how to present Climate change as a story based on experiences, and
not just as disembodied information without storytellers. And a storyteller cannot tell a story
without listeners. Over 80 years ago the American thinker John Dewey wrote that “vision is a
spectator; hearing is a participator” (Dewey, 1927). Climate change debates and interventions
are intrinsically about voice and listening. There is often a tension, a disconnection, between
those who speak and those who listen.
Toward a politics of engagement
What is much needed in this tense relation between the science and the politics of
climate change is an emphasis on education: on climate change literacies; that is,
learning about climate change science, climate change justice and climate change
action. And not just transferring new information, but learning to learn about climate
change.
A politics of engagement must also include a serious concern for climate change
education and literacy, a pedagogy of climate change from primary schools to the
education of journalists in tertiary education.
Environmental policy reforms require a political imagination that rests on
engagement with civic-driven initiatives for social change and climate change
literacy plays a fundamental role.
This is particularly important if we consider that learning how to cope (adapt,
mitigate) with climate change in one place is not necessarily transferable to another
place where local cultural, economic and environmental contexts might be radically
different. In this regard, engaging with local communities is significant because it is
in local contexts where adaptation, mitigation and action on climate change actually
takes place. Hence, the importance of community media.
As way of conclusions:
We should concede that participation and voice do not necessarily lead to change.
Ways of knowing about climate change can’t be disembodied and abstract (as often
presented by the media), but rich in feeling, in intuition, and connection to the larger
social and historical context.
Quotes:
“at every level the greatest obstacle to transforming the world is that we lack
the clarity and imagination to conceive that it could be different.”
Roberto Unger
“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack.
What is missing is the courage to understand what we know
and to draw conclusions”.
Sven Lindqvist
"The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you
need to know to take meaningful action in the present.”
Paul Saffo