Climate Change Communication: 'A' Is for Audience

"How often do climate-change communicators take the time to understand what audiences know, think and feel about climate change? Not often enough I fear."

In this blog, Mike Shanahan describes a presentation made as part of the BBC Media Action project Climate Asia. Supported by the United Kingdom government's Department for International Development (DFID), this research and communications project has, to date, interviewed 33,000 people in 7 Asian nations, asking them about their experiences of, knowledge about, attitudes toward, and actions to address climate change. The presentation that Shanahan reflects on in this blog was held on Climate Communications Day (December 4 2012, Doha, Qatar) during the United Nations (UN) Climate Change Conference (Conference of the Parties, or COP 18). Internews' Earth Journalism Network and IIED organised the day to explore ways communicators can use new approaches to reach new audiences with information about climate change.

As Shanahan reports, during the presentation, Tan Copsey of BBC Media Action gave the following example: Suriya Begum is an economically poor young mother from Bangladesh. When her photograph appeared in a media story about climate change, it was only so that the article could show a victim - not so it could explain she knows, thinks, and feels about climate change. Copsey asked the Doha conference participants: "Don't you want to know, as a room full of communicators, how she is affected and how she gets her information?" Copsey and his co-presenter, Lottie Oram, shared some findings so far from the Climate Asia research; for example, people don't get much information about climate change from the media, though they think it has a role to play in reaching them.

In the discussion that followed the presentation, participants said that there is often a climate-change angle to what appears in a newspaper, but the subject rarely gets a mention. Even with supportive editors, journalists face challenges in reporting on climate change, such as the risk of danger for reporting on environmental issues (click here to learn more).

According to Shanahan, Copsey said that Climate Asia interviews in Bangladesh gave insights into what climate change means to women who live in the slums of Dhaka. One interviewee "prefers TV to other media - she trusts it because she can see it - she watches TV in a communal area, especially in the early afternoon when she's finished with her household tasks and men from the slum are at work. She likes Bengali movies and TV drama serials. She talks about what she watches with other women in the slum. She once saw something about climate change on TV but didn't understand it." Along these lines, Shanahan says that the Climate Asia research has indicated that "journalism may be less effective than entertainment". One idea from Indonesia is a "lifestyle-swap" reality TV show about climate-related migration. In Vietnam, a TV game show pits farmer against farmer to show off and share knowledge of how to adapt agriculture to the changing climate.