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Ditch "nerdy" language to bring home message about climate change impacts and how to adapt to them
CANCUN, Mexico (AlertNet) - Like most journalists, I don’t much like jargon. “Stakeholder” gives me indigestion, not to mention the acronym soup of climate-speak: LDCs, MRV, ICA, AWG-KP and of course LULUCF.
Still with me? I thought not.
That’s why I was happy to hear at last week’s Cancun climate talks that Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action and host of the Copenhagen climate meeting, agrees with me.
Using so many difficult abbreviations and what she termed as “nerdy” language to communicate about climate change means “nobody outside of this (meeting) will understand what we are talking about”, she warned listeners at a briefing on women’s leadership on climate issues.
“We really need to do something to make climate and the climate issue much more tangible to people,” she said.
That means telling the stories of people dealing with worsening droughts, floods, storms and other climate impacts around the world, or trials of clean development innovations.
“This is not just about 2 degrees and 450 ppm (parts per million) and polar bears and melting glaciers,” Hedegaard said.
Many in the richest parts of the world, where climate impacts have been slowest to hit, still see climate change as a relatively far-off worry, if they see it as one at all. That’s despite record flooding in parts of Europe this year, brutal heat and fires in Russia and record summer temperatures across parts of the United States.
In contrast, for farmers trying to figure out when to plant maize in increasingly dry southern Africa, or herders in northern Kenya looking for grass, or coastal Bangladeshi families watching their fields go under salt water, climate change is undeniably here and now.
Telling their stories is the way to convey that “climate change is not a theoretical future challenge”, Hedegaard said, but something that “impacts millions and millions and millions of peoples’ lives”.
Millions of people around the world are also finding creative ways to adapt to climate change, or to spur development without spurring carbon emissions. Their stories may be a particularly effective way of engaging those who have tuned out doom-laden climate predictions.
Hedegaard related how she’d recently visited a sustainable forestry project in India that had removed the need for women to walk miles to find firewood while at the same time storing carbon. With a little more free time on their hands, many of the women had opened their own small businesses, boosting family income which allows them to build better houses and put more children in school.
With their confidence boosted, many had also, for the first time, begun participating in public decision making.
“That’s the kind of transformation we can do if we use climate change as a driver,” Hedegaard said.
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