03 September 2009
Effective Communication Key to Addressing Climate Change
Challenge lies in finding ways for data providers and data users to talk
Geneva — The first three days of the third World Climate Conference in Geneva — plenary sessions, working sessions, forums, roundtable discussions and side events — are over. This was the expert segment of the five-day meeting, a historic international gathering where those who collect and analyze climate data met for the first time with those who need climate information to adapt to the advancing effects of climate change.
The next two days will be filled with high-level discussions among 15 heads of state, more than 80 ministers, and delegations representing more than 150 countries. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will address the conference September 3 and Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will give a keynote address.
At the end of it all, on September 4, conference attendees hope to have lashed together the basics of a global framework for climate services — like daily weather forecasts, only at seasonal, year-to-year and ultimately decadal timescales — that will be further developed over time after the meeting.
One of the most difficult aspects of building this new infrastructure for delivering climate services doesn’t involve developing more advanced computing power or funding more climate observations, although both are needed. No. The hardest part will be finding a way for climate information providers and climate information users to talk to each other.
Across the table from the climate scientists will be other kinds of experts. They will know a lot about climate change and food, water, energy, disaster risk reduction and ecosystems. And they’ll know about working with communities, especially the poorest communities, which will be hardest hit by the effects of climate change.
On the third day of the expert segment, Madeleen Helmer from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies told about her realization and that of her colleagues, while looking at a graph in one of the IPCC assessment reports, that climate change will have its major effects in extremes and shocks, not in gradual warming or sea level rise. They realized they’d have to understand the risk and how they could include it in the way they work.
“One of the first things you can do is go to where the knowledge is,” she said, “and where the knowledge is, is not a traditional partner for an organization like the Red Cross. We are in the disaster management system, we are in the health system, we’re not in the scientific system that much. … It’s obvious you have to go to the national meteorological offices, but it’s not always easy going. It’s partly a clash of cultures. … Although we need to partner together, we need to be patient with each other from both sides.”
During a Red Cross pilot climate change project in a Central American country, the national met office was happy to work with them and said they had satellite information to share.
“We said that’s great, we appreciate the partnership, but we have to do more,” Madeleen said. “We have to understand together how we bring that knowledge from the satellites not only to the headquarters and capitals but down to the communities where there’s no telephone, no electricity, and one bus a day.
“That’s the intellectual challenge we encountered on the first pilot and still encounter today,” she added. “We see more and more that it’s easier maybe to put the satellite in the atmosphere than to think together how we can bring that knowledge down to the communities where people are not that educated, they have not gone to university, so to come in with graphs and statistics and maps won’t do the trick. We have to be smarter than that. It’s easier to talk among peers about sharing knowledge, going from one Ph.D. to the next. It’s more difficult to bring that knowledge down to the field.”
This article was originally published on the America.gov blog Adaptation! Please read related entries and join the conversation.
