News Category: Climate Crisis

Hopeful results from the world’s largest survey on climate change

With the perpetual sense of urgency surrounding crucial elections and the widely prevalent despair over tragic wars, it can sometimes seem like the pressing need for climate action has taken a back seat.

However, according to world’s largest standalone public opinion survey on climate change, People’s Climate Vote 2024 conducted by the UNDP and the University of Oxford, it is dominating our thoughts.

I found the results from this survey to be both surprising and hopeful. For instance, they found that 87 percent of the world’s population (surveyed) cares about the state of our planet! That’s a remarkable consensus in our deeply divided world.

It’s just one of their many compelling findings. Below you’ll find some brilliant graphics made by UNDP highlighting some other key findings.

Three reasons why I’m sharing this survey:

1. We don’t necessarily know what people are thinking, if we don’t ask the right questions: With all the arguments we see in public forums, we could be led to believe that we’re very attached to our prehistoric fuel. But the survey finds that 72% of people globally want their country to transition from fossil fuel to clean energy quickly.

2. Easy, shareable visuals: UNDP has broken down the findings from their enormous survey into accessible and relatable visuals. I think these should be widely shared and used to change archaic policies that don’t reflect what the majority of the world is thinking and feeling.

3. Hope: Lastly, and most importantly, to reassure those of us working on climate change mitigation (in whatever capacity) that it’s not a losing
battle – 81% of people globally want their country to plant trees and protect wildlife!

You can find the survey here: People’s Climate Vote 2024. If you’re interested in the topic, I can promise you, it’s not a long, dull read.

(Visuals below are by UNDP)

The march of the Mosquito

The Aedes albopictus, or the Asian tiger mosquito, is gaining notoriety this summer. It was the focus of an article in The Guardian a few days ago, it was on the Dutch NOS news yesterday, and it also makes an appearance in this article published in Open Access Government that I collaborated on with my colleagues, epidemiologists at KIT Institute, Jake Mathewson, and Ente Rood.

Why is it making headlines? This dreadful mosquito is a vector for diseases such as chikungunya, yellow fever, and dengue.

Growing up in India, I vividly recall government officials combing through the garden during the warm, wet monsoons – when this dreaded mosquito thrives – looking for stagnant water. They’d warn us against empty pots with stagnant water and promptly throw out any collected water they saw.

Just yesterday, the NOS featured a public health professional doing precisely the same thing in Arnhem.

This striped menace is on the move!

The rising temperatures in this age of climate change offer fertile ground for this mosquito to move and multiply. However, Jake and Ente suggest that to stop the advance of this mosquito and other diseases that will gain ground, we must extend our efforts, broaden our scope beyond our backyard and borders, and commit to transnational strategies.

To know more about how we can and should respond to the shifting burden of diseases, read our article here: https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/the-shifting-burden-of-neglected-tropical-diseases-in-the-age-of-climate-change/176417/

Or download the PDF.

Talking the (Climate) talk

You may have already come across this climate dictionary by the UNDP. It’s been making the rounds on social media for a while now.

I’ve found it to be an incredible resource that can be used in so many ways!

It’s a patient guide that helps you navigate the nuanced world of climate change terminology. The dictionary identifies and explains quite a few of the confusing terms and concepts one might come across while reading about climate change.

For instance, what is the difference between carbon removal and global carbon capture, and is it the answer to all our troubles? See page 14.

You could extract a specific page and send it to a friend looking for a simple explanation of a puzzling term they’ve just heard – I did it.

If find that it’s more than a dictionary – it’s a quick onboarding to the world of climate change communication.

Climate change communication has a new four-letter word

We like bad news. Or so this recent study published by nature human behavior would have us know. The authors of this paper examined over 100,000 viral news stories and found that most people clicked on headlines with negative words that instilled fear more often than they did on those with positive words. The reason for this, they explain, is somewhat coded in our genes.

“The tendency for individuals to attend to negative news reflects something foundational about human cognition—that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli across many domains” they explain. They go on to elaborate that humans, from infancy, focus their attention on the negative stimuli in their environment. “Negative information may be more ‘sticky’ in our brains,” they say.

What’s this got to do with climate change communication you ask? Quite a lot, I’d say.

There is no doubt that the climate crisis is the biggest challenge that humanity has ever faced. As we collectively blunder through it, one of the toughest aspects of it is figuring out how to communicate about this crisis. Clearly, we are gluttons for punishment because we evidently love bad news and need fear to get us to move. Just like in the old days, when Neanderthals lurking around our caves, forced us to develop tools that may have driven the Neanderthals to extinction, and allowed us, homo sapiens, to reign strong.

But when it comes to climate change reporting, too much of it causes climate anxiety and fear for their future – especially among the youth. Some experts believe this can be a good thing and stimulate action among young people. At the same time, paradoxically, all this bad news is also causing a rise in news avoidance. So then is fear the new four-letter word in climate change reporting?

If not fear, then what?

Should we have more hopeful communications? Dr Matthew Hornsey and Dr Kelly Fielding caution against messages of hope. According to them, “Distress is strongly correlated with mitigation motivation; hope is not”. In their research, they found that messages informing people of any form of happy progress somehow made people even more complacent. This doesn’t really shock anyone, I imagine. Then is hope the new four-letter word in climate change communication?

Not necessarily. It depends on what kind of hope you’re selling. Human-rights strategist and communications expert and founder of hope-based communication, Thomas Coombes advocates the use of solutions in hope-based communications. While the Drs Hornsey and Fielding found that positive messages of progress that inspired hope led to complacency, they also found that positive messaging around solutions also led to inaction. People just didn’t want to engage in solutions if there was no real urgent need for them to.

So, for some, fear might be the new four-letter word in climate change communication, and for others, it might be hope. I personally believe we need a healthy dose of both with a smattering of solutions. Simply because no one is going to try to put out the fire if we all believe we’re going to surely burn – even if the water hoses are right in front of us.

We need the purveyors and messages of hope and vision to assure us that even if there is a high likelihood of all of us burning, there is a small chance that if we all pick up the hoses in front of us, big or small, we just might be able to put out the fire.

Communications to turn the tides

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is in grave danger, according to the Sustainable development Goals Report published this month. The report also highlights areas that need exploring to salvage the situation.

No one expected a glowing report in the aftermath of a pandemic. Especially with the war in Ukraine directly impacting access to food around the world. But seeing the cold, hard numbers in colorful infographics is sobering.

For instance, progress on SDG 1, No Poverty, has been derailed by COVID-19. After a steady decline in extreme poverty rates, we’re seeing the first rise in extreme poverty since 1998. Rising food prices and the war in Ukraine are poised to push this even further.

The window for Climate Action, SDG 13, is rapidly closing. At the same time, in 2021, emissions increased by 6% and reached the highest levels ever. And according to the report, “current national commitments are not sufficient to meet the 1.5 °C targets. Under these commitments, greenhouse gas emissions are projected to increase by almost 14 percent over the next decade”

These are just two of the 17 goals. Each goal is examined in this report. To read about the status of each goal I recommend reading the report or going through the summaries here. Urgent and comprehensive action is vital to rescue these goals from becoming mere tokens.

According to Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, Liu Zhenmin, “The severity and magnitude of the challenges before us demand sweeping changes on a scale not yet seen in human history.”

Of course, this situation has been building up over the years. And this is evident in previous reports.

On a constructive note, what is different in this year’s report was the inclusion of a section highlighting the effectiveness of communication strategies. They break down the diverse communication channels used by National Statistics Offices and how effective these channels were in countries with different levels of income (graph from the report below). They write, “The opportunity is ripe to take advantage of modern communication channels and produce tailored support and data products to reach different user groups.”

As someone who has been working in communication for years, I’ve found that the area of communications is consistently underestimated and underutilized – frequently an afterthought. But, as the report states, the time is ripe to utilize all the communications tools at our disposal to make the sweeping changes needed to turn the tide.

Book Review: The Nutmeg’s Curse – Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh

This book starts with the mystery surrounding a story of a lamp falling in the dead of the night on the island of Selamon, in the Banda Archipelago, in 1621. This lamp sparked the genocide that was to follow on the Banda Islands by the Dutch East India Company.

The Banda Islands are surrounded by still-active volcanoes and one of the gifts of this volcanic soil is Nutmeg. According to Ghosh, at the time, the worth of this spice in Europe had reached mythical proportions describing it as “envy-inducing symbol of luxury and wealth that conforms with Adam Smith’s insight that wealth is something desired, not for the material satisfaction that it brings but because it is desired by others.”

In the following chapters, he writes about the colonisation of the Americas and the brutal treatment of the indigenous people at the hands of the colonisers. Amitav Ghosh, an Indian-born writer, frequently refers to the decades-long colonisation of India in his book as well. As an Indian, I was especially keen to read his views.

Not a book on colonisation.

This, extremely well-researched book is filled with parables on how the extermination of the indigenous peoples led to the extermination of a type of thinking that had kept the original inhabitants in rhythm with the land they lived on for centuries, till the colonisers arrived.

In addition to other truly Machiavellian practices like terraforming, this was done by systemically linking nature-based thinking, solutions or mysticism with so-called ‘savagery’, and replacing it with market-based thinking that viewed the Earth as a resource simply to be used and inevitably exploited. The consequences of which we are facing today with the climate crisis.

Now, he writes “The Western settler-colonial culture is no longer confined to the settled colonies. Since the adoption in 1989, of the Washington consensus, the ideologies and practices of settler-colonialism have been actively promoted, in their neo-liberal guise, by the world’s most powerful countries, and have come to be almost universally adopted by the national and global elites.” And it’s these settler-colonial practices that are now being implemented in many a former colony, unfortunately.

The parables in this book are forcing me to rethink my ideas of progress. As a product of a post-colonial society and education, I am beginning to see more clearly how deeply entrenched our mistaken views of progress in this world are. It made the need to re-establish a value system that is not rooted in exploitation, and has a more symbiotic relationship with the Earth, all the more urgent to me.

In this book he elaborately explains why we cannot fight the climate crisis by simply using market-based-solutions-thinking – the very thinking that caused this predicament in the first place. To truly tackle the climate crisis, we first need to question the foundation of our foggy and distorted ideas of progress.

In my opinion, books like this one are fighting hard to break through this fog.

FAQ on the Climate Crisis by people who don’t have the time to research it

Arctic Glaciers I recently had an eye-opening conversation about climate change with a childhood friend of mine. We happened to start discussing some of projects I’d been working on. At some point in our conversation I suddenly realized that I spend so much time talking to people who are already embedded in the topic and the looming climate crisis that I had made a horrible assumption. I had assumed that most people know about the intricacies of the looming crisis.

This friend of mine is a neurologist, she teaches neurology and she’s studying epidemiology in her free time. So, she’s busy! She doesn’t have the time to delve into the climate crisis too. She’s too busy solving the health crisis.

That got me thinking, perhaps I could write down some questions that came up and make a sort of FAQ on the climate crisis for those people who don’t have the time to research it on their own.

I’m not a climate scientist, but as a communications and research consultant it is my job to know how to find answers to the questions and communicate them in an accessible fashion.

If you have questions you’d like to add to the list or sources that provide easy information, please feel free to email me!

Read the FAQ here.

Gender Equality in Climate Change Communication

I recently joined a very informative webinar hosted by the Reuters Institute of Journalism and the University of Oxford on the ‘Missing Perspectives of Women in the Covid-19 News’. Speaking on the issue was Luba Kassova of AKAS. Her presentation was based on a report that AKAS had written for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Juliana Romao for Unsplash

Of the many insights I gathered from the talk, and later reading the report, here are three of my key take-aways. I am aware I am drawing parallels, but I believe we could use these findings to ensuring gender equality while talking about climate change too. Both, in how we engage with women as readers and protagonists.

Women are more interested in the local angle

According to the study, women are more likely (than men) to be interested in the local angle. The report recommends covering local dimensions of the story to improve engagement among women. Especially topics that worry women the most like, unemployment, healthcare, crime and gender violence. Particularly in the global south.

Women are drawn to news that has a human-interest angle

Somewhat related to the point mentioned above, the report suggests including more news stories that “offer micro-angles anchored in human interest stories emphasizing the humanity in this crisis.” Rather than focusing on the macro-level. The report finds that only 9% of the many international stories they researched on Covid-19 had a human story within them. They also found that surprisingly few women were the main protagonists in these stories. Consequently, one of their many recommendations was to make sure women were quoted often in news articles as experts.

Non-profit organisations frequently use human-interest stories to engage their audience. I have written many myself. So, it’s nice to have the research to back up the efficacy of this kind of communication.

Facts are overtaking both men and women

According to Luba the detached facts took over the human aspect of the Covid-19 coverage in the news articles that they tended to be less ‘emotionally engaging’. That is not to say that the study recommends dispensing with facts. According to the report putting facts within a human-interest frame, adding an individual’s story to it, makes the fact memorable. Especially to women.

Of course, this is but a quick glimpse into the fascinating report. I’ve merely skimmed the surface of things. It is a valuable resource on improving how we communicate about climate change and how we can direct our efforts to engage more women and add more women’s voices to the narrative. You could read the whole report here.

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of The Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte

I highly recommend this book. Particularly if you still carry your childhood fascination for dinosaurs into adult life. As I do. Paleontologist, Brusatte, manages to distill a vast amount of complex information into an accessible book. He also explains complex geological concepts and research findings with great ease. He peppers the book with anecdotes that lighten what could be a dry read. And the passion with which he pursues his subject echoes in each page of his book.

The narrative around dinosaurs is often one of failure, that they died at the peak of their time on Earth. However, in the Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs, Brusatte views these beasts, that have captured our collective imagination, as an evolutionary success. At a time when the Earth’s core came bubbling over, and on more than one occasion baked its inhabitants, dinosaurs managed to survive, evolve and become monstrous marvels that somehow survived millions of years. Of the sauropods (the Brachiosaurus, the Brontosaurus etc.) he writes that one of the reasons why they managed to grow as large as they did was as because they “weren’t competing for the same plants but dividing the resources among themselves.” The scientific term for this, he says is niche partitioning.

I am inclined to agree with him. This book was first published in 2018. But I am reading it now in the midst of a pandemic and at the brink of a climate catastrophe. And that brings me to my main take-away from the book.

The Earth’s warming, the seas heating and melting icecaps aren’t a new phenomenon. This has happened before and will happen again for sure. But our behaviour has exacerbated the process tremendously. What took a couple of a million years in the time of the dinosaurs, in the era of human beings has just taken a couple of millennia. Us human beings haven’t lived a fraction of the lives of the dinosaurs. Evidently, the Earth will renew itself and new life will blossom. Will human beings be a part of that new life? Like dinosaurs will we evolve and reinvent ourselves and perhaps partake in some niche partitioning?

So, it seems to me that the climate isn’t in crisis, human life is. Shouldn’t we call it what it is? Who knows, it just might elicit the response we need to address it.

Sweden: What Could Climate Change Communicators learn from the Covid-19 crises? (Part 2)

Waiting for an interview — Steve Halama for Unsplash

It’s no secret that ever since the Coronavirus shut down most of the world, Sweden has been an outlier. As a resident of Sweden, it’s been interesting to see the narrative that has been swirling around the Nordic country’s approach to the lockdown. Actually, ‘interesting’ is putting it mildly. I’m not going to throw my hat into the ring and fight for my point of view on whether the decisions have been wise or unwise. I definitely don’t have the expertise to comment. What I can comment on are the questions that are being asked about the country’s approach and my take-away on what people like myself, who communicate about different crises, could learn from it.

Sharing the same story

In Sweden, like most other countries, there seems to be one overarching narrative that seems to be over-shadowing the seemingly smaller stories. This, I understand, is the nature of the storytelling beast: If something appeals to the audience, the writers will churn out more of it. It’s easy. For example, in India, lack of a livelihood is forcing hungry migrants stuck in locked-down cities to return to their home-states. Some desperately walk for miles to get home. Each individual story is heart-rending and heroic. And international news is rife with these stories.

Similarly, in Sweden, the narrative that the Swedish government is experimenting with herd-immunity by not implementing a lockdown has eliminated all other lines of questioning. I recently watched a BBC Hardtalk interviewer ask the country’s most quoted epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, about why so many of the country’s elderly had lost their lives to the virus.

However, instead of pursuing a line of questioning that would actually lead to a new, more relevant response i.e. systemic cost-cutting that had led to poor management, the interviewer pursued the herd-immunity line of questioning that every international media house has done to death.

New questions, new voices and new stories

Consequently, very little was added to the narrative of the country during that interview. Which, to me, seems like a missed opportunity to shine a spotlight on a problem that sorely needs to be addressed.

So, what can we learn from this for communication around the climate crisis? The Covid-19 crisis like the climate crisis touches every corner of society and will only get worse if the issues that need to be addressed aren’t. Simply because the questions aren’t being asked. I find that if we are to tackle something so ubiquitous, we cannot afford to stick to a populist line of questioning. For instance in the Hardtalk interview Anders Tegnell could’ve been asked about what was being done to address the disproportionate number of fatalities within minority communities. Perhaps then the global narrative around Sweden might have experienced a bit of a detour.

To institute global change that will tackle a scaled-up version of the Covid-19, which the climate crisis is fated to be, we also need to scale-up the questions we ask, the voices we hear and the stories we tell.