Climate Change Communication

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article.

Public engagement refers to processes that provide a distinct role for citizens or stakeholder groups to contribute to policy making. Such engagement is distinctive because it aims to create opportunities for mutual learning among policy makers, scientists, stakeholders, and members of the public. In so doing, public engagement involves a particular type of voice in public debate and policy making that is different from more established discourses, such as those expressed through official policy-making channels, among scientific institutions, by civil society activists, or in the public media. By the early 1970s, public engagement had emerged in the context of an overall democratization movement in Western societies through such innovations as the “Citizen Jury” in the United States and “Planning Cells” in Germany. Today it is often more pragmatically motivated, as for example in the European Commission, where public engagement is seen as tool for ”responsible research and innovation” that helps to anticipate and assess potential implications and societal expectations of research and innovation, and to design more inclusive and sustainable research policies.

The first global public engagement processes in history were created to incorporate citizen voices into United Nations conventions on biodiversity and climate change. Building on theories of deliberative democracy and tested practices of public engagement, a new World Wide Views process was developed to provide informed and considered input from ordinary citizens to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference. This and subsequent World Wide Views deliberations have demonstrated that public engagement can potentially open up policy discourses that are constricted and obfuscated by organized interests. A telling example is provided by the World Wide Views on Climate and Energy deliberation held on June 5, 2015, where nearly 10,000 ordinary citizens gathered in 76 countries to consider and express their views on the issues to be addressed at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris later that year. In a noteworthy departure from prevailing media and policy discourses, two thirds of the participating citizens saw climate change as “mostly an opportunity to improve our quality of life,” while only a quarter saw it as “mostly a threat to our quality of life,” a result that was consistent across high, middle, and low income countries.

Recent research on public engagement has indicated that, when effectively implemented, such processes can increase the legitimacy, quality, and capacity of decision making. The specific impacts include cognitive and attitudinal changes (e.g., better awareness of environmental and scientific issues), development of new capacities (e.g., new professional skills, methods, and platforms of collaboration), and mobilization of resources for addressing scientific and societal challenges (e.g., research funding, political commitment, public awareness, and social acceptance). Earlier aspirations for broader impacts, such as the democratization of policy making at all levels, are now less prominent, but arguably, are indispensable for achieving both immediate and longer-range goals. The relatively new concept of a deliberative system captures this complexity by moving beyond the narrow focus on single public engagement events encountered in much research to date, recognizing that single events rarely affect the course of policy making. The evolving prospects for public engagement in biodiversity and climate change policy can therefore be seen as requiring ongoing improvements in the capacities of the deliberative system.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has emerged as a potential strategy for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It involves the capture of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from large point source emitters, such as coal-fired power plants. The CO2 is transported to a storage location, where it is isolated from the atmosphere in stable underground reservoirs. CCS technology has been particularly intriguing to countries that utilize fossil fuels for energy production and are seeking ways to reduce their GHG emissions. While there has been an increase in technological development and research in CCS, some members of the public, industry, and policymakers regard the technology as controversial. Some proponents see CCS as a climate change mitigation technology that will be essential to reducing CO2 emissions. Others view CCS as an environmentally risky, complex, and expensive technology that is resource-intensive, promotes the continued extraction of fossil fuels, and competes with renewable energy investments.

Effective communication about CCS begins with understanding the perceptions of the general public and individuals living in the communities where CCS projects are sited or proposed. Most people may never live near a CCS site, but may be concerned about risks, such as the cost of development, environmental impacts, and competition with renewable energy sources. Those who live near proposed or operational projects are likely to have a strong impact on the development and deployment of CCS. Individuals in locally affected communities may be more concerned about disruptions to sense of place, impact on jobs or economy, or effect on local health and environment. Effective communication about the risks and benefits of CCS has been recognized as a critical factor in the deployment of this technology.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article.

In debates surrounding policy options for mitigating emissions of greenhouse gasses (GHG), economists of various political stripes are near unanimous in their advocacy of putting a price on carbon emissions, whether through a tax or emissions trading program. Politically, however, few politicians have been brave enough to impose costs on emissions occurring within their own borders. This state of affairs, and the more recent diffusion of market-based instruments across political jurisdictions around the world raise new and important questions regarding how best to communicate the benefits of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs. How do advocates and opponents of carbon pricing frame their arguments around carbon pricing? How do experts, journalists, political leaders, and members of the public understand these policy instruments; and what specific approaches have been most successful in persuading policy makers and the public to support a price on carbon? In places that have yet to implement a carbon price, what can communication strategists learn from other jurisdictions that have successfully implemented a carbon price? In places where carbon taxes or emissions trading programs exist, how are the benefits of these policies best communicated to ensure the durability of carbon pricing policies over time?

Policy communication and the resulting influence that information has on policy decision-makers is an especially pertinent topic when it comes to problems of climate change. Notorious for its complexity, uncertainty, and divergence of viewpoints, climate change has earned the title of being the major “wicked” or “super-wicked” problem of our times. A proliferation of expertise, interests, and capacities mark the climate change policymaking landscape and this density of players warrants an advanced framework to understand the ways in which the variety of climate-pertinent knowledge is communicated to policymakers. Moving beyond undifferentiated “two-communities” models of knowledge utilization in policymaking which limit the discussion to the bilateral interactions between knowledge experts or “producers” and information “consumers” of the public sector, this article explores the concept of a policy advisory system, which embodies the different sets of influence that various policy actors can have during policy decision-making and how communication between and among actors is a significant aspect of climate change policymaking. The concept of policy advisory systems is an important new development in the policy studies literature and one that is analytically very applicable to climate policy contexts. Suitably generalizable across representative policy settings, policy advisory systems are comprised of distinct groups of actors who are engaged in the definition of policy problems, the articulation of policy solutions, or the matching of policy problems to solutions. We explore how individual members of these separate sets of actors—namely the epistemic community, which is occupied in discourses about policy problems; the instrument constituencies which define policy instruments; and the advocacy coalitions which compete to have their choice of policy alternatives adopted—interact and communicate with policymakers across climate change policy activities.

The annual United Nations Climate Change Conferences, officially called Conferences of the Parties (COPs), are the main drivers of media attention to climate change around the world. Even more so than the Rio and Rio+20 “Earth Summits” (1992 and 2012) and the meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the COPs offer multiple access points for the communicative engagement of all kinds of stakeholders. COPs convene up to 20,000 people in one place for two weeks, including national delegations, civil society and business representatives, scientific organizations, representatives from other international organizations, as well as journalists from around the world. While intergovernmental negotiation under the auspices of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) constitutes the core of COP business, these multifunctional events also offer arenas for civil society mobilization, economic lobbying, as well as expert communication and knowledge transfer.

The media image of the COPs emerges as a product of distinct networks of coproduction constituted by journalists, professional communicators from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and national delegations. Production structures at the COPs are relatively globalized with uniform access rules for journalists from all over the world, a few transnational news agencies dominating distribution of both basic information and news visuals, and dense localized interaction between public relations (PR) professionals and journalists. Photo opportunities created by globally coordinated environmental NGOs meet the selection of journalists much better than the visual strategies pursued by delegation spokespeople. This gives NGOs the upper hand in the visual framing contest, whereas in textual framing NGOs are sidelined and national politicians clearly dominate media coverage. The globalized production environment leads to relatively similar patterns of basic news framing in national media coverage of the COPs that reflect overarching ways of approaching the topic: through a focus on problems and victims; a perspective on civil society demands and solutions; an emphasis on conflict in negotiations; or a focus on the benefits of clean energy production. News narratives, on the other hand, give journalists from different countries more leeway in adapting COP news to national audiences’ presumed interests and preoccupations.

Even after the adoption of a new global treaty at COP21 in Paris in 2015 that specifies emission reduction targets for all participating countries, the annual UN Climate Change Conferences are likely to remain in the media spotlight. Future research could look more systematically at the impact of global civil society and media in monitoring the national contributions to climate change mitigation introduced in the Paris Agreement and shoring up even more ambitious commitments needed to reach the goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius as compared to pre-industrial levels.

Scientific agreement on climate change has strengthened over the past few decades, with around 97% of publishing climate scientists agreeing that human activity is causing global warming. While scientific understanding has strengthened, a small but persistent proportion of the public actively opposes the mainstream scientific position. A number of factors contribute to this rejection of scientific evidence, with political ideology playing a key role. Conservative think tanks, supported with funding from vested interests, have been and continue to be a prolific source of misinformation about climate change. A major strategy by opponents of climate mitigation policies has been to cast doubt on the level of scientific agreement on climate change, contributing to the gap between public perception of scientific agreement and the 97% expert consensus. This “consensus gap” decreases public support for mitigation policies, demonstrating that misconceptions can have significant societal consequences. While scientists need to communicate the consensus, they also need to be aware of the fact that misinformation can interfere with the communication of accurate scientific information. As a consequence, neutralizing the influence of misinformation is necessary. Two approaches to neutralize misinformation involve refuting myths after they have been received by recipients (debunking) or preemptively inoculating people before they receive misinformation (prebunking). Research indicates preemptive refutation or “prebunking” is more effective than debunking in reducing the influence of misinformation. Guidelines to practically implement responses (both preemptive and reactive) can be found in educational research, cognitive psychology, and a branch of psychological research known as inoculation theory. Synthesizing these separate lines of research yields a coherent set of recommendations for educators and communicators. Clearly communicating scientific concepts, such as the scientific consensus, is important, but scientific explanations should be coupled with inoculating explanations of how that science can be distorted.

Given the dire nature of many researchers’ predictions about the effects of global climate change (e.g., rising sea levels, droughts, more extreme weather), it comes as little surprise that less attention has been paid to the subtler, less direct outcomes of rapid climate change: psychological, sociological, political, and economic effects. In this chapter we explore one such outcome in particular: the effects of rapid climate change on aggression. We begin by exploring the potential for climate change to directly affect aggression in individuals, focusing on research showing the relationship between uncomfortably hot ambient temperature and aggression. Next, we review several lines of research illustrating ways that climate change can indirectly increase aggression in individuals. We then shift our focus from individuals to the effects of climate change on group-level aggression. We finish by addressing points of contention, including the challenge that the effects of climate change on aggression are too remote and too small to be considered relevant.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article.

Is hydropower “green”? Is it “sustainable”? Is it “renewable”? Does hydropower provide a necessary alternative to fossil fuel dependence? Can its ecological consequences be mitigated? Is this the end of the era of hydropower or simply the beginning of a new chapter? These are the questions about hydropower that circulate through public discourse in an era of climate change, lending a sense of urgency to the many decisions to be made about the future of hydropower dams.

The United States and the European Union saw an enduring trend of dam building, from the Industrial Revolution through the mid-1970s. Contemporary media discussion in these countries about hydropower focus largely on the removal of existing hydropower dams and the retrofitting of existing dams that offer hydropower potential. Outside of this context, increasing numbers of countries debate the merits of building new large-scale hydropower dams that, in many developing countries, have disproportionate impacts on indigenous communities who hold little political or economic power. As a result, news and social media attention to hydropower, outside the United States and the European Union, has been trained largely on activist efforts to oppose hydropower and the complex consequences for ecosystems and communities.

Despite the wide range of ecological, economic, and social tradeoffs, and the increasing urgency of conversations about hydropower globally, relatively little work in communication studies explores news media, social media, or public debate about hydropower and dam removal. Existing studies, largely from the United States, Chile, Sweden, and France have applied a range of methods to analyze media coverage and debate over hydropower. More recent research has explored in depth the nature of hydropower and the dam removal debate across New England states, employing media discourse analysis, interviews, participant observation, design charrettes, and role play simulations.

Participation by citizens and stakeholder groups is an important aspect of climate governance at the regional, national, international, and global levels. Increasing awareness of anthropogenic causes of climate change has fueled calls for democratic action and renewal that promise to enrich both existing and emerging forms of political engagement. Participation is not a panacea, however, and has many limitations. Three substantial critiques of participatory and deliberative approaches to climate change hinge on questions of power, authority, and opportunities for dissent. The climate system itself poses unique challenges to democratic governance. Accelerating rates of environmental change associated with climate change make past experience less applicable to current situations and complicate predicting the future even further. As such, participatory and deliberative approaches may need to be reconfigured to respond adequately to the challenges of climate change. Systems approaches broaden the scope of participation and deliberation, and innovative participatory methods are increasingly moving beyond narrow framings of climate change. As deliberative and participatory initiatives become more common, it is no longer a question of supporting or rejecting participatory forms of climate governance. Rather, questions need to address what kinds of consequences will occur and in whose interests certain participatory processes operate. Which social views and values are supported and which are marginalized, and what are the consequences of collective responses to this pressing environmental and social issue?