We are Climate Change: Climate Debates between Transnational and Local Discourses
Michael Brüggemann and Simone Rödder
Local discourses around the world draw on multiple resources to make sense of a "travelling idea” such as climate change, including direct experiences of extreme weather, mediated reports, educational NGO activities, and pre-existing values and belief systems. There is no simple link between scientific literacy, climate change awareness, and a sustainable lifestyle, but complex entanglements of transnational and local discourses and of scientific and other (religious, moral etc.) ways of making sense of climate change. As the case studies show, this entanglement of ways of sense-making results in both localizations of transnational discourses and the climatization of local discourses: aspects of the travelling idea of climate change are well-received, integrated, transformed, or rejected. Our comparison reveals a major factor that shapes the local appropriation of the concept of anthropogenic climate change: the fit of prior local interpretations, norms and practices with travelling ideas influences whether they are likely to be embraced or rejected.
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.
Communication and Knowledge Transfer on Climate Change in the Philippines
Thomas Friedrich
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.
Sense-Making of COP 21 among Rural and City Residents: The Role of Space in Media Reception
Imke Hoppe, Fenja De Silva-Schmidt, Michael Brüggemann, and Dorothee Arlt
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.
What Does Climate Change Mean to Us, the Maasai? How Climate Change Discourse is Translated in Maasailand, Northern Tanzania
Sara de Wit
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.
Living on the Frontier: Laypeople’s Perceptions and Communication of Climate Change in the Coastal Region of Bangladesh
Shameem Mahmud
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.
Extreme Weather Events and Local Impacts of Climate Change: The Scientific Perspective
Friederike E. L. Otto
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.