Global Warming in Local Discourses: How Communities around the World Make Sense of Climate Change

—Mike Hulme, University of Cambridge

It will be a valuable resource to those studying climate and science communication; those interested in understanding the various roles played by journalism, NGOs, politics and science in shaping public understandings of climate change, as well as those exploring the intersections of the global and the local in debates on the sustainable transformation of societies.

We are Climate Change: Climate Debates between Transnational and Local Discourses

This chapter investigates how fifteen inhabitants of the Greenlandic capital, Nuuk, make sense of climate change and its impacts through media exposure and personal experiences. While Greenland’s melting ice sheet has long served as a backdrop to the global climate debate, local public views of climate change have largely been overlooked. This study finds that, although the media is an important source of information about climate change for the inhabitants of Nuuk, their sense-making of the phenomenon is saturated by personal experiences. Alarmist media representations, for instance, are continuously challenged by references to personal experiences of positive local impacts of climate change. The chapter identifies six distinctions underlying the inhabitants’ sense-making of climate change — natural/unnatural, certainty/uncertainty, self/other, local/global, positive/negative, and environment/economy.

Separately from its physical reality, climate change has become a travelling idea (Hulme 2009). Through numerous policies, laws and regulations, the global discourse on climate change is affecting many people, irrespective of how strongly they experience the consequences of a changing climate. The idea travels via a long chain of communication and translation from the global to the local level. Along the way, however, knowledge becomes detached from its meaning (Jasanoff 2010). This chapter uses the case of the Philippine island of Palawan to show how an idea can be re-integrated into a meaningful context during multiple translations from its source to its destination in local ontologies. The chapter demonstrates that the local reception of climate change discourse is influenced by pre-existing, shared systems of knowledge and meaning that are reproduced and maintained by circular rather than unidirectional, top-down communication. Irrespective of scientific accuracy, climate change thus becomes a coherent, plausible, and tangible concept regarding what people already know, believe and experience. Based on empirical data that has been collected in multi-method fieldwork in Palawan, this chapter shows that sense-making is a multi-layered process, in which discourses and narratives, cultural models of human-environment relationships, interpersonal communications, personal experiences, and other sources of information (including the media) play a decisive role in how climate change is eventually comprehended and communicated. Using the ethnographic example of a lay theatre performance, the chapter paradigmatically demonstrates how the reproduction and dissemination of the local notion of climate change takes place. It concludes by offering recommendations for climate communicators drawn from the case study.

This chapter explores the role of space in making sense of climate change coverage. The role of space is analyzed in the form of (a) (attributed) spatial distance and/or proximity to climate change, (b) personal nature and weather experiences attributed to climate change and (c) social spaces. The study compares how the United Nations’ summit COP 21, which resulted in the Paris Agreement in 2015, has been perceived and interpreted in an urban (Hamburg) and a rural setting (Otterndorf), both located in Northern Germany. In each setting, two focus group interviews were held (n = 15), one with long-term inhabitants and one with newly relocated citizens. This data was complemented by media diaries (including standardized and open questions), in which participants documented their communicative engagement with the climate summit on a daily basis. Media use in both cases is fairly similar, with participants in the rural setting using their local newspaper more intensively. Yet, local newspapers’ quality of reporting the summit was deemed as highly deficient, failing to provide a local angle to the climate summit and to the broader topic of climate change. Media, apparently, have not explained the issue well: climate change and politics are perceived as overly complex and distant. Space plays an important role: people in the rural setting—with the rising tides of the North Sea behind the dikes—felt more personally concerned by climate change than inhabitants of Hamburg. Furthermore, long-term inhabitants drew much stronger links between climate change and their region. The duration of stay in a certain setting thus turns out to be an important moderator of spatial influence on interpretations of climate change.

This chapter explores the varying ways in which the Maasai pastoralists in Terrat village in northern Tanzania give meaning to climate-change discourses. This study moves away from the idea that there is a "linear” (from global to local/science to citizen) and "correct” way of interpreting and understanding climate change as a scientific discourse, but turns the question around by asking "what does climate change mean to the Maasai”? Based on fourteen months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter contextualizes climate change discourses in the historical, environmental and political dimensions of the Maasai’s "interpretive horizons”. It is argued that local discourses and interpretations are not just barriers in the global pursuit for climate change adaptation, even if they contradict global discourses and policies, but reveal crucial insights about local priorities, values, and agency. In other words, the rejection of this new discourse should not be seen as a form of ignorance, but rather as an act of cultural translation and resistance. 

Despite a considerable increase in the number of studies on public perceptions of climate change, little attention has been paid to the development of public understanding of climate change in developing and less-developed countries, which have contributed comparatively few greenhouse gases emissions. This chapter contributes to address this gap in the literature by exploring how people construct meanings of climate change risks in an area at the forefront of climate change risks—the coastal region of Bangladesh. The study draws on in-depth interviews of local citizens, which were supplemented by field observations. The interviews reveal a recurring theme of localizing climate change risks in the context of local geo-hazards. Laypeople’s personal exposure to local extreme weather events, and experiences of weather and seasonal variances, influence their interpretations of mediated and non-mediated climate change information. The risks of local geo-hazards appear to be readily available as prior constructs in respondents’ minds, and are further intensified by newly acquired knowledge of climate change. The chapter concludes that laypeople’s perceptions of climate-change impacts in the coastal region of Bangladesh are constructed on the basis of their place identity, on the one hand, and the availability of regional geo-hazards, on the other.

While global and regional temperature increases are the most certain indicators of anthropogenic climate change, due to the emissions from burning fossil fuels, the damage caused by climate change is most clearly manifest in changes in seasons and extreme weather events. Recent advances in the attribution of extreme weather events, combined with newly available observations of past weather and climate, have made it possible to causally link high-impact extreme events to human-induced climate change. The level of confidence in these findings, however, varies according to the type of event and region of the world. While the increase in heatwaves can be quantified with confidence in most parts of the world, attribution assessments for droughts and hurricanes are much more uncertain.