Communicating adaptation: The triumph of personal hope?
05/11/10 13:23
Several times on this blog, I’ve provided anecdotes on the tensions around communicating climate change to diverse audiences, especially about how to prepare our families, communities, and societies for additional climate change impacts. Often, the conflicts around messaging are about how to communicate hope for immediate action to create a more positive future relative to trying to frighten people with negative futures into “acting right.”
In China and India, for instance, I’ve been told that fear is a more effective means of motivating action around environmental issues generally and climate change in particular. From Europeans and Australians, I’ve heard that fear is “played out” as an communication message for the environmental community, a result of decades of scare tactics about crises immediately around the corner from a variety of time bombs — overpopulation, pollution, energy consumption, and so on. My own view as a North American in the US is that fear doesn’t with any longer with most of the electorate here either. Perhaps in the 1960s or 1970s frightening ordinary people created positive change. But that time now seems long dead.
These are not academic, unimportant questions. Policymakers make decisions every day that make the process of helping our society adjust to realized and anticipated shifts in climate, decisions that prioritize new infrastructure (or upgrade existing facilities), endorsing or eliminating government programs that train staff in new techniques, reach out to the public to describe the basis for policy, engage with scientific or other technical groups, develop monitoring systems, and so on. For instance, the many state governments in the US as well as the federal government are using infrastructure development as a means to stimulate the weak economy. Building roads and repairing bridges, updating urban water treatment facilities and pipelines, and increasing the electrical grid capacity invariably raises questions about how long these facilities are expected to function and under what weather conditions. A road constructed in a low-lying coastal or riparian zone under assumptions that might have made sense in 1970 would probably no longer seem like a good investment decision in 2010 as extreme flood and tropical cyclone events become more common (and probably more extreme). Subsidies for particular types of crops also represent similar types of risks. Continuing to grow water-intensive crops such as cotton in increasingly arid regions is another type of poor policy investment, especially since large-scale agriculture is usually coupled with extensive hard infrastructure construction such as irrigation, groundwater pumping, and transportation networks.
There are also interesting differences here between climate mitigation and climate adaptation. Climate mitigation, remember, is mostly about slowing the rate of climate change. In practical terms, climate mitigation looks like global policy, which modifies national economic policies about energy generation and consumption, and then trickles down to individuals as a “low carbon economy.” Right or wrong, for many opponents to such policies, a low-carbon economy looks like fewer cars, a slower rate of development, and probably a lower standard of living, at least in the developed world. To these individuals, climate mitigation messaging sounds like living with less — with sacrifice. I’d argue that climate adaptation sounds more positive, at least in theory. Climate adaptation, after all, is about how to plan for a better future. It’s like insurance or investing — you want to avoid losing what you’ve achieved, but you also want to make sure that you can keep living well.
Thus, finding the best way to communicate both the need for new actions and the urgency for implementing those actions is an important issue, even if the approach might vary by nation and culture.
I’ve also noted that there is a strong personal element to this issue. Many of the scientists I know who work on climate change issues have chosen to remain childless, which is a disturbing and profound commentary on their sense of how much hope they have for a better future. Or perhaps their sense of the relative risk of bequeathing a much worse life than they’ve known so far to their offspring. If you think the world is going to be much, much worse than now, what parent in her or his right mind would want to burden their grown child (or grandchild)?
This issue has long been quite personal with me. I am relatively old for a first-time parent at 42, and while I have not had a child to date for many reasons, one was a genuine fear for the earth of 2040 or 2060.
However, a few weeks ago, my wife and I flew to Ethiopia to pick up the young son we adopted. In truth, I don’t know have any stronger sense of what the future holds than I ever have. But I decided that raising one good child was realistically the most positive contribution I could make to creating a better world and effecting positive change. I hope — for his sake — I am right. And I fear for his good opinion, decades hence.
These are not academic, unimportant questions. Policymakers make decisions every day that make the process of helping our society adjust to realized and anticipated shifts in climate, decisions that prioritize new infrastructure (or upgrade existing facilities), endorsing or eliminating government programs that train staff in new techniques, reach out to the public to describe the basis for policy, engage with scientific or other technical groups, develop monitoring systems, and so on. For instance, the many state governments in the US as well as the federal government are using infrastructure development as a means to stimulate the weak economy. Building roads and repairing bridges, updating urban water treatment facilities and pipelines, and increasing the electrical grid capacity invariably raises questions about how long these facilities are expected to function and under what weather conditions. A road constructed in a low-lying coastal or riparian zone under assumptions that might have made sense in 1970 would probably no longer seem like a good investment decision in 2010 as extreme flood and tropical cyclone events become more common (and probably more extreme). Subsidies for particular types of crops also represent similar types of risks. Continuing to grow water-intensive crops such as cotton in increasingly arid regions is another type of poor policy investment, especially since large-scale agriculture is usually coupled with extensive hard infrastructure construction such as irrigation, groundwater pumping, and transportation networks.
There are also interesting differences here between climate mitigation and climate adaptation. Climate mitigation, remember, is mostly about slowing the rate of climate change. In practical terms, climate mitigation looks like global policy, which modifies national economic policies about energy generation and consumption, and then trickles down to individuals as a “low carbon economy.” Right or wrong, for many opponents to such policies, a low-carbon economy looks like fewer cars, a slower rate of development, and probably a lower standard of living, at least in the developed world. To these individuals, climate mitigation messaging sounds like living with less — with sacrifice. I’d argue that climate adaptation sounds more positive, at least in theory. Climate adaptation, after all, is about how to plan for a better future. It’s like insurance or investing — you want to avoid losing what you’ve achieved, but you also want to make sure that you can keep living well.
Thus, finding the best way to communicate both the need for new actions and the urgency for implementing those actions is an important issue, even if the approach might vary by nation and culture.
I’ve also noted that there is a strong personal element to this issue. Many of the scientists I know who work on climate change issues have chosen to remain childless, which is a disturbing and profound commentary on their sense of how much hope they have for a better future. Or perhaps their sense of the relative risk of bequeathing a much worse life than they’ve known so far to their offspring. If you think the world is going to be much, much worse than now, what parent in her or his right mind would want to burden their grown child (or grandchild)?
This issue has long been quite personal with me. I am relatively old for a first-time parent at 42, and while I have not had a child to date for many reasons, one was a genuine fear for the earth of 2040 or 2060.
However, a few weeks ago, my wife and I flew to Ethiopia to pick up the young son we adopted. In truth, I don’t know have any stronger sense of what the future holds than I ever have. But I decided that raising one good child was realistically the most positive contribution I could make to creating a better world and effecting positive change. I hope — for his sake — I am right. And I fear for his good opinion, decades hence.
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