Communicating better about Research on Climate Change
Carlo Carraro explores communication strategies for creating impact with climate change research.
Scientific research on climate has a hard time finding media space aimed at the general public. More generally, the effort of thousands of researchers showing clearly the urgency to implement a plan for controlling climate change does not succeed in translating itself into a constant, effective impact on the decisions of individuals and public decision makers. Yet scientific research will not be doing all it can if it fails to share its results with the general public and to get the challenge of climate change on the political agenda at various levels. The evidence emerging from scientific and economic research needs to make its way with the right means and appropriate language, on the one hand to policymakers responsible for the choices of today that will impact on the climate of tomorrow, and on the other to the civil society: citizens’ consent, a crucial ingredient in the making of government decisions, is a prerequisite for implementing policies of mitigation and adaptation to climate change.
Research must therefore be “translated” and disseminated properly. IPCC, with its periodic reports, assesses existing scientific production worldwide on the topic of climate change, providing a summary for the approval of governments, and also taking on the task of popularizing the science and economics of climate change.
A few months have gone by since the completion of the IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), which ended with the publication of its Synthesis Report in November 2014, and it is probably time to ask if IPCC, through a concrete upgrade of its communication activities, has managed to do better than on previous occasions in terms of its impact on decision-makers and the general public.
In the memorandum prepared by Robert Stavins and Charles Kolstad on the basis of the results of the late February 2015 workshop, in which we examined the evaluation and dissemination processes of IPCC research, two weak points emerged in the publicizing of the latest reports:
- the Summaries for Policy Makers were too complex for a lay public
- the impact of the three-volume report (four, if we include the Synthesis Report) may have suffered from not having been published simultaneously.
It is worth recalling that each of the four volumes of the Assessment Report includes a summary (Summary for Policy Makers – SPM), designed to summarize the key points of the report and to be approved by political policy makers. No minister heading a government agency will ever read through any entire IPCC volume; hence the usefulness of the SPM’s and their approval by the IPCC assembly, an approval that makes the SPM’s more a political document than a scientific one. Nevertheless, the SPM’s themselves are often too long (thirty pages) and insufficiently summarized and simplified for a (i) lay audience (ii) overwhelmed with information (iii) and with little time to spare.
From Richard Black’s analysis, recently published in Nature Climate Change in his article “No more summaries for wonks”, the work of publicizing to the policy world carried out by the first working group (WG1) was the most auspicious. The colored boxes (an example in the figure) highlight the key messages and enable hasty readers to grasp the major results by merely browsing through the text and stopping where their eye calls them to attention. This structure was then omitted from the second and third volumes, while it has been reinstated in the SPM of the Synthesis Report. The report would have been more effective if a greater homogeneity among the three volumes had been assured.
Ar5 IPCC’s WG1 volume highlights its key messages in colored boxes
The Physical Science Basis, the first volume, was also the only one to include the document “Headline Statements from the Summary for Policymakers”, two pages that clearly and concisely pinpoint the conclusions of the approved SPM. Yet this is just the type of document that might land on the desk of a decision maker and get him or her to devote the few minutes necessary to read it.
It’s hard to summarize all the facts about climate in just a few easy-to-understand sentences, but it’s important for IPCC itself to make the effort to summarize and simplify: if IPCC doesn’t do it, others will. Delegations, institutions, NGOs, think tanks, journalists make up different versions of the same content, some more accurate, others less so. If IPCC fails to control the chain of communication of their contents from the very first link, it will run the risk that some parts may be misunderstood.
In addition, the key message summary can be disseminated in ways other than a merely printed text. Through videos, infographics, slide shows for use in presentations, and extensive use of all social media. This is a new task for IPCC, done essentially for the first volume, perhaps because the next two volumes did not single out with equal clarity the messages to pass on to policy makers and the general public.
Let’s look now at the media, the highway for reaching the general public. Simplifying content isn’t the only way to make it newsworthy. Timing too is crucial in communication, and the latest IPCC reports have probably suffered from bad timing. Spread over a period of more than a year, the publication of the various AR5 volumes were staggered between September 2013 (WG1) and November 2014 (Synthesis Report). WG3, the volume focused on climate policies and their costs, received much less media attention than the first two volumes, a sign of flagging interest due to “old news”.
WG1 turned out to be the volume most cited in the Anglo-American press [1], thanks to its combination of good timing and efficiency in getting out the news, while WG3 suffered, despite the fact that its contents weren’t at all lacking in newsworthy potential. What the latest volume lacked to make it media appealing comes forth in the study Dominant frames in legacy and social media coverage of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, namely the elements for building a compelling narrative: images, videos, graphics, actions of daily life – essential media building-blocks, whose absence compromised the presentation of the more abstract issues around climate change mitigation policies.
Apropos of communication, we must of course include the print media, TV and radio. But since 2007, the year IPCC’s previous Assessment Report was published, the communication world has been revolutionized by the explosion of the social networks, which now have an immense power of dissemination, often overlooked by the world of science. With Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Fickr and blogs, communication is a two-way street: questions demand answers in real time or almost. In conjunction with the publication of each AR5 volume activity peaks were registered in Twitter thanks to the #climatechange, #globalwarming, #IPCC, and #AR5 hashtags. It’s a great challenge in terms of transparency and accountability, but above all a great opportunity for reaching our target audience without intermediaries. IPCC has taken up the challenge by setting in 2012 its communication strategy in an innovative way. Great efforts have already been made, with overall good results: the video summaries of the three volumes (viewable at this link: WG1, WG2, WG3) are clear and compelling. Nonetheless, even here bad timing and insufficient message clarity were evident in the paucity of the video viewings (WG1 has been viewed 111,100 times to date, WG2 58,000 times, and WG3 just 33,600 times).
On different aspects of IPCC’s communication strategy there is ample room for improvement: in addition to reviewing the structure of the SPM’s in relation to their audience (cutting the parts that don’t contain key messages, even if it means passing over references to some of the chapter contents, as was done in the two Headline Statements pages) and rethinking the publication timing of the different parts of the report, deeper IPCC involvement with the society and policy makers is desirable in a 2.0 world. Leo Hickman of Carbon Brief offers some ideas [2]: social media training, regular interactive sessions with experts through platforms such as Google Hangout and the establishment of an official real-time question and answer service. All this, not only at the publication time of the reports, but during the entire production cycle. The effort required would be significant, but if we picture such an IPCC we can also picture the impact that such relevant content for human beings, the economy and society could have on the decisions of us all.
Tis post first appeared on Carlo Carraro's blog.
Photo credit: catherinecronin / Foter / CC BY-SA
Notes
[1] Saffron O’Neill, Hywel T. P. Williams, Tim Kurz, Bouke Wiersma and Maxwell Boyko, Dominant frames in legacy and social media coverage of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Nature Climate Change,vol.5 (apr. 2015)
[2] Leo Hickman, The IPCC in an age of social media, Nature Climate Change,vol.5 (apr. 2015)
[3] Richard Black, No more summaries for wonks, Nature Climate Change ,vol.5 (apr. 2015)
[4] James Painter, Climate change in the media. Reporting risk and uncertainty (2013)
