A 16-year-old girl from Sharjah is motivating citizens to become more environmentally-aware through her tailored audience approach. Environmental communications experts say this may be the best strategy we have.
When it comes to convincing the public of the need to save the planet, the environmental campaigner Arushi Madan instinctively understands one of advocacy’s most important techniques.
For every audience the 16-year-old schoolgirl from Sharjah encounters, she always makes sure that she tailors her message. “I’ve spoken to five and 10-year-olds about global warming and I’ve conveyed the same message to women who were aged 20 to 45,” she says.
“With the children I spoke about the importance of saving energy and of turning off lights, but with the women I was able to speak in a very different manner.”
For the teenage activist however, reaching out to different audiences is more than just a matter of making sustainability fun or deploying the right facts and figures. Instead, Ms Madan strives to make her campaigns socially and culturally relevant.
Last October on the eve of Karwa Chauth, an Indian festival in which married Hindu women observe a fast to ensure the health, prosperity and longevity of their husbands, she hosted a workshop with housewives in Sharjah to discuss environmental activism in the home.
“I told them that we need to pay the same amount of attention and love to the Earth as they do to their husbands, and we discussed the efforts that they can make as women,” Ms Madan explains.
“If you educate a man you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman you educate generations.”
Ms Madan’s energy and enthusiasm for environmental campaigning has brought its own rewards. The Delhi Private School student has won a host of honours for her campaigning work, including an International Diana Award, presented in memory of the late UK royal, Diana, Princess of Wales, and in February of last year, she served as the UAE’s representative for the Global Youth Eco-Leadership Summit in Seoul, South Korea.
What Ms Madan is not aware of however, is that even though she operates at a grass-roots level, her approach –to talk about climate change in terms that are tailored, personal and local – is a strategy that is needed to transform the way climate change is communicated and negotiated at the very highest levels. “I think we will see an attempt at a complete paradigm shift in the way the world approaches climate change,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, as he looks forward to this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris.
“Most people are intensely local and we dedicate relatively little shelf-space in our brains to international affairs or global issues, and climate change is an issue that has been overwhelmingly framed as global,” says Mr Leiserowitz.
“Even if they accept climate change is real and happening, they think of it as distant in time – that the impacts won’t be felt for a generation or more – and distant in space.
“This is an issue about the planet, polar bears and penguins, about the ice in the Arctic Ocean or maybe some small island nations in the Pacific. It’s out there but it doesn’t connect to people’s daily life and values and it’s just not a high priority.”
Mr Leiserowitz’s views have been confirmed by the publication of his latest research paper, Predictors of Public Climate Change Awareness and Risk Perception Around the World, which was published in the journal Nature Climate Change on July 27.
Using data from a 2007-2008 Gallup World Poll, which was conducted in 119 countries, Mr Leiserowitz led an international team of researchers to identify the factors that most influence climate change awareness and the perception of risk for 90 per cent of the world’s population.
“Overall, we found that about 40 per cent of adults worldwide have never heard of climate change, and this rises to more than 65 per cent in some developing countries, like Egypt, Bangladesh, and India,” says Mr Leiserowitz.
“The developed world is far more aware of climate change than the developing world, and that is primarily driven within the developing world by education.
“Most importantly, this means that the people who are most exposed to climate impacts lack the concepts to inform their decisions about the future,” the academic explains.
“This paper is a real wake-up call to many countries around the world to say: ‘We need to do a far better job of informing our own people’.”
The findings of this survey did not come as a surprise to Per Espen Stoknes, a Norwegian psychologist who has described the efforts of climate campaigners as “the greatest science communication failure in history”.
“There is a dissatisfaction and impatience with climate change communications, and people are experimenting a lot,” says Mr Stoknes.
“Everybody agrees that the old model doesn’t work anymore.”
In his new book What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, Stoknes cites MY World, a 2014 United Nations survey, which asked up to 7.2 million people what single factor would most improve their lives.
Out of the 16 issues identified by the global survey, “a good education” was ranked first but “action taken on climate change” came last.
According to Mr Stoknes, citizens of developed countries in the West cared more about climate change 25 years ago than they do now.
“Obviously there is something about the climate issue and the way it has been communicated that does not come across, or, if it does there is a backlash.”
In his book, Mr Stoknes condenses and simplifies up to 500 research papers and articles that have been written over the past decade about the barriers that prevent people from making a long-term engagement with solving the issue.
“Are humans inevitably short-termist?” Mr Stoknes asks. “What does it take to make us act for the long term and beyond a three, four or ten year horizon?”
Employing the concepts and language of marketing, psychology and behavioural economics, Mr Stoknes believes the negative reaction to news and predictions about climate change is due to a series of psychological factors which include what he describes as the “framing of doom”.
“The message has been that if we don’t do something now the planet will burn and there’ll be some dreadful catastrophe at some point in the future, but this is a narrative that has been overused,” the psychologist explains.
“We’ve heard for years how costly it will be to do something about climate change and that we have to sacrifice something today in order to be safe in the future, but the effect of this has been to generate resistance and avoidance, not engagement.”
Part of his solution is to suggest changes to the ways in which climate change is discussed. “If you want to reach conservative groups with solar power in the US, one way to do that is to not talk about how it is good for the environment but in terms of free markets and the freedom of choice it can provide,” the Norwegian says.
“Marketing knows that storytelling is the ultimate tool of persuasion so we must teach climate scientists how to tell better stories.” For Mr Stoknes, one of the other key solutions is the development of signals that are tangible, understandable and which provide the public with the motivation to stay engaged.
“Climate science has been using indicators that are very remote for people. It talks about PPM [parts-per-million] of C02 or sea level rise in inches per decade, but all of these weird numbers are utterly meaningless to people in general,” says Mr Stoknes.
“Climate scientists and environmental activists have also been very good at saying what they are against – emissions, industry and growth – but they’ve been very poor at describing a future that would persuade commerce, industry and the wider public to come along with them.”
Mr Stoknes believes that there are huge opportunities to be gained from “re-framing” the climate change debate, not just in reducing waste and emissions, but in achieving a more profound societal transformation that involves new forms of growth and a higher standard of living.
“What we need is a new narrative, which I call the green growth narrative, which is about being innovative, energy efficient, resource efficient and having smart cities. It’s a perspective that more and more economists are coming round to.”
When it comes to “re-framing” the language of climate change, however, Mr Leiserowitz insists that what is required is rather more complicated than a matter of rebranding.
“It’s not a matter of applying business logic to a problem that is so bigger than just a marketing challenge. It’s about calling for far greater sophistication and for multiple communication strategies, tactics and messages for a very diverse set of audiences.
“We cannot wait for everyone in the world to become a dyed-in-the-wool deep ecologist. If we’re going to wait for that, we’re doomed, because that’s not going to happen, but the point is – it doesn’t have to be that way,” he says.
“We all have completely different starting points and we’ll all take different roads to get there, but that’s OK.”
For Mr Stoknes, one of the biggest transformations would be to see climate change as an opportunity for humanity to reinvent itself as something that helps nature rather than destroys it, but he admits that even if the reasons for climate apathy are individual and psychological, the solutions are not.
“It doesn’t really matter what one and each of us do separately, but we need to act as social citizens. To have an impact, we really need to act together,” he says.
nleech@thenational.ae